


Hold the line

by eldritcher



Series: Pandemic [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adult Content, BAMF Minerva McGonagall, Complicated Relationships, Epidemics crossing over from the Muggle world and affecting Wizards, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Friendship, Love, Multi, Romance, Self-Acceptance, Self-Discovery, Sex, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-13 18:42:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29158347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: Then Love comes along, plucky and persistent, and proceeds to drink all her scotch.
Relationships: Albus Dumbledore & Minerva McGonagall, Minerva McGonagall & Aurora Sinistra, Minerva McGonagall & Tom Riddle, Minerva McGonagall/Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody, Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape
Series: Pandemic [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2137872
Comments: 47
Kudos: 43





	1. Pennies from Heaven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Squibstress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Squibstress/gifts).



> Many, many thanks to [Squibstress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Squibstress/pseuds/Squibstress) because of whom I first discovered the joys of writing Minerva, long ago on Livejournal. Recently, I stumbled on a note from her in Livejournal. It spurred my bout of productivity. This has been a difficult time for most of us. It has given me great joy to write these stories with renewed inspiration from someone I've looked up to :) 
> 
> Written as a self-contained story, with the plot shaped by the external circumstances of a virus.
> 
> Minerva's first person narration.

_1940s_

"Did you hear?" Alastor Moody whispered, as we sat together in the History of Magic Classroom listening to Binns drone on.

Alastor could be counted on for prime gossip. 

He played Quidditch. He volunteered for all manners of clubs. He was outgoing and popular, jocular and loved by everyone in Gryffindor tower. 

I was approached by my fellow students only when they needed to copy my assignments. They would shuffle to me in the corner of the library I had made home, and ask hesitantly for my work. 

I gave them what they sought, and hoped, desperately hoped, that at least one might strike up a conversation. 

I was lonely.

The female students in my dormitory gave me a wide berth, because I did not know how to participate in their conversations about boys. The male students found in me neither a love for sports nor feminine charm. 

The teachers were fond of me, citing my work as exemplar for the others, and I had received Outstanding on every assignment I had handed in. This did nothing to endear me to the students.   
  
Alastor was the exception. He had never treated me differently than he treated the others. He was polite to a fault, and charming as he was to all female students, and remained the only human connection I had at Hogwarts.   
  
"A Muggle virus crossed over to Wizarding London," he told me. "The Minister is worried." 

The purebloods, inbred to weakness, had little immunity to new diseases. When a Muggle disease crossed over to us, it would often lead to horrific death tolls in our community. 

\----

"Gryffindors, one of the students at this school has been stricken by the Polio virus," Dumbledore said solemnly. "They have been isolated and we have asserted that no other student or staff was exposed. There is no cause for alarm." 

He had called a late night meeting. We were assembled in the common room, frightened by this strange formless enemy he warned us of.

"Who is it?" Charlus Potter asked. 

"To safeguard the privacy of the student, we will not be revealing their identity," Dumbledore replied, stern-faced. His words carried a silent warning that we were not to snoop. He knew us well. 

\----

Life went on. 

In my little corner of the library, I read old tomes and made up invisible friends in my head. 

One night, Riddle came barging in, teetering as if drunk. He was disheveled and reeked of mud and blood and potions gone wrong.

I stared at him, horrified. 

If I were Alastor or Charlus, I would have immediately rushed to help. If I were any of my female fellow students I would have run to call for help. That was what Dumbledore had taught us to do.

I remained frozen, watching him stagger to the shelves and rifle through the books in the Restricted Section, frenetic as a madman on a mission. 

It was a part of the library I had not been permitted access to. Slughorn turned a blind eye to these infractions from his Slytherins. Dumbledore did not allow the Gryffindors to break the rules. 

There were books with teeth, nipping at Riddle's fingers. There were books that vomited daggers. There were books that exploded in his hands. He continued his search, relentless, with burns on his skin and ash on his robes. When the tilt of his head caught the firelight from the torches, I saw his eyes were blurred red and circled by purple marks of sleep deprivation. 

Riddle was as close to a study partner as I had in this school, with whom I had entered the occasional discussion about spellwork or potions. 

While he did not live in the library as I did, he spent many hours of his week immersed in reading, by a large bay window that looked to the lake, enveloped in a tattered woolen blanket that smelled of mothballs and dust. 

Whenever he was in residence, the House Elves would pop in and out, plying him with tea and biscuits and tending to the fireplace. The Castle, they said, was fond of him. 

"It must be here!" He was muttering to himself, pale and wrought tense, as he began pacing up and down the shelves, scanning the books. 

If I had been in his state, would he have approached me? I did not know. He was standoffish, but for the rare instances when he was carried away by his enthusiasm for a book or a spell. 

Any of the Gryffindors would have, I knew. They may not seek my friendship, but they would not stand about gawking if I was in genuine misery. 

I was a Gryffindor. Dumbledore had taught us to be kind.

So I went to Riddle, keeping a wary eye on the nearest exit. 

He was an exploding keg of volatile magic at the best of times, as everyone in our Transfiguration class knew. He could not keep a level head when it came to Dumbledore. Some said that Dumbledore riled him up knowingly. There was often a magical accident or two in that classroom, when Riddle's magic slipped his control and exploded in hormonal angst. 

"What are you looking for?" I asked him.

He was swirling to face me, wand drawn, nearly jumping out of his skin. 

"Bloody buggering tits!" Riddle exclaimed, running the stained sleeve of his school robes over his brow in exhaustion. "Do that again and I will tie a bell about your neck!"

I blushed at his swearing. Then I scowled, at his threat. 

Riddle, they said, had grown up a street rat in London. His language, frequently profane when his facade of perfection slipped, lent credence to it. Even my brothers did not swear as he did. 

"You look as if you tussled with the Squid," I told him sternly. "What is wrong?"

He shook his head, brow pinched in worry, and returned to his frantic perusal of the shelves. 

Curiosity was beginning to replace kindness as my motivation. What was he looking for? He had a pass to the Restricted Section. This might be my chance to snoop where Dumbledore had barred us from! All good Gryffindors snooped and got up to harmless mischief, the Prefects had told us, winking. Perhaps this tale of derring-do might finally endear me to my housemates! 

"It can go better with two pairs of eyes," I told him. 

Riddle sighed, sounding skeptical. Oh, he had a high opinion of himself, this one. I rolled my eyes.

"Books on arresting nerve degeneration," he said finally. 

"Healing?" I asked, wondering what he needed those for. "We should be looking in the shelves further to the right." We were standing by the section that housed the lore on the Cruciatus.

"Do you know how the Cruciatus works?" He asked. 

My mind leapt to the answer. 

"It attacks the nervous system," I breathed, excited by the discovery. "It excites the neurons. If it was parameterized carefully, it could potentially reinvigorate dying nerves!" 

Riddle's eyebrows were high on his head. A pleased grin took over his gaunt features, transforming him into a schoolboy once more. 

"Polio!" I whispered, connecting the dots. 

He nodded. 

Abraxas Malfoy. It must be Abraxas Malfoy. Riddle's gaze softened whenever it rested on the Malfoy scion at dinners in the Great Hall. It was evident to nearly none, but I knew Riddle fairly well, inasmuch as anyone knew him, due to our occasional debates in the library. 

So we worked together to put together the books he needed. It was illegal, and Dumbledore would give me detention for the rest of the year were he to find out, but it was the first time I had undertaken anything with another. I felt warm and seen, and wondered if this was what friendship could be. 

"Shall I help you brew?" 

He shook his head.

"Riddle, you know it shall go faster with two!"  
  
"The ingredients are volatile and the process unproven," he said briskly, shrinking the books into his satchel. "Dumbledore would feed my entrails to the Squid if you were harmed, Minerva."

"The books here are volatile! I kept myself safe," I hissed, furious that he would not let me see this noble adventure to the end. "I don't need your bloody chivalry."

He scowled and said, "This is Dark Magic. Dumbledore's disapproval and detentions are rather different from a life sentence in Azkaban." 

He was right. I swallowed. The potion was based on the Cruciatus. 

Dawn streaked through the skies, pink and pale. I was abruptly tired and afraid. What if-

"If they catch you-"

He was poor. He had no prospects. He had no friends. He had no patrons. He was an orphan that had grown up on the streets. There was a war in the Muggle world. 

"Azkaban will be an improvement over my current habitation," he said wryly. "I hear that the market for boy toy prisoners is at an all-time high." 

"Riddle!" I exclaimed, horrified at his crudeness. "What if we go to Dippet and tell him about this potential cure?"

"The prognosis from the healers is that he will die tomorrow," Riddle said softly. "I don't have the time." 

"Good luck," I told him, worried. I did not know Abraxas. However, Riddle I had seen at his most vulnerable, and he had let me help him, and he had trusted me. 

"Oh, I have faith in my brewing," he said, obscenely confident as he ever was when it came to his skills. "Ta, Minerva, I must be going. Even Slughorn draws a line at Dark Magic in his classroom. My brewing is in the forest and it is a brisk hour's walk. The centaurs shan't be pleased if I reek up their eden, so I had best hurry and complete this."

"Ta," I told him, testing the word out in my mouth. 

My mother would be horrified at the slang. I felt young and rebellious. 

* * *

_1950s_

"Would you like to come with me to Madam Cubbytoe's for tea?" I asked hesitantly. 

Alastor shook his head, deep in his paperwork. 

I colored at the pitying glances from the others in the dark Ministry office. 

I had entered the Auror training programme because of Alastor. However, once we had begun our training, he had changed abruptly, turning keenly focused on catching and punishing practitioners of the Dark Arts.

Over our school years, I had slowly come to find myself enamored by him, by his charm and warmth.

I had begun to think that his attentions to me were motivated by a similar affection as the one I nursed for him.

Perhaps he merely required encouragement, as I had read in Witch Weekly. After all, I had often been called unapproachable. Perhaps my lack of feminine charm and awkward reserve had fazed Alastor. So I had begun to attempt indicating my interest, first tentatively and full of hope, and then in anguish. 

"Lunch tomorrow then?" I asked. 

The other four in the room watched us in prurience. 

"Alastor?" 

"What is wrong with you, Minerva?" He barked, frustrated. "I need to get through these case files today." 

He did not need to. Those were cold cases from decades ago. I swallowed my ire and upset, and hastily got to my feet, needing air. Whispers followed me as I rushed out, and it tore down the last of my composure. 

In my desperate haste, I did not pay attention to where I had been going, and ran into Charlus Potter, one of my old classmates.

"Miss McGonagall!" He exclaimed, horrified at the state of me, averting his gaze in discomfited politeness. 

"I apologise," I muttered, and ran down the Atrium to the streets outside.

I slipped into Knockturn, and my feet took me of their own accord to Borgin and Burkes. 

Hesitating at the threshold, I wondered what had possessed me to rush out of work. I was in a training programme. I would be marked down for my impulsive desertion. 

"Well, don't just stand about there malingering!" Riddle called out, over the blaring record he was playing on his gramophone. 

He had put out tea and shortbread. A strong cup of Brodies. The biscuits were fresh baked. I inhaled the smell of baking that lingered still in the dingy shop. It was a fire hazard. The Ministry Health and Safety department would have a fit if they saw his adapted kitchen amidst the cursed artifacts his employer stocked.

"Hurry up, or they will be cold," he reminded me, returning to his dusting as if it was his enlightened purpose in life. 

I sat down to pour myself a cuppa and then dunked the shortbread into the tea. It annoyed Riddle when I did that. He claimed that it ruined the shortbread experience. What would he know? I was from Scotland. He was not. 

My fury and shame settled a jot, comforted by tea and biscuits. Riddle could win any chef's competition. He had begun to learn to cook to cater to Malfoy's delicate constitution after the polio episode. Then he had come to find it relaxing, or so he claimed. 

I turned to watch him, where he was arduously dusting a sixth century Anglo-Saxon cursed codpiece. 

"Where is your overlord?" 

"I sent my esteemed employer home. He had a case of the shakes."

His employer was an odious creature. The last time I had visited Riddle at the shop, Borgin had called me a harlot and asked Riddle to entertain his streetwalkers on his own time. He had fallen silent at the look in Riddle's eyes then, and had not said a word more. 

I did not understand why Riddle worked here. Yes, he had no connections, but he was as good as married to Abraxas Malfoy, who possessed connections in all corners of the world.

His manner had mellowed and even his reserve had begun loosening a notch since our schooldays. Perhaps it was the lack of regular arguments with Dumbledore that had led to this. He worked at the most loathsome shop in London, but he seemed happy as a lark. I was quite suspicious. Riddle, by nature, was not given to happiness. 

"I am not your friend," he said abruptly then. 

It no longer stung. I had known him for more than a decade. 

That potion I had helped him research had saved Abraxas, though he had been left a cripple with a shattered constitution. Malfoy's father had declared that he would offer Riddle any amount of riches in gratitude for saving his heir. Riddle had declined. Riddle, who had not a Knut to his name, had refused the Malfoy patriarch. 

And not long after, he had claimed a mightier prize. He had taken Abraxas Malfoy as his lover. 

All these years later, they held each other, by choice, even if neither law nor society looked kindly upon their arrangement. 

All these years later, Riddle had never turned me away whenever I had chanced upon his doorstep, whether it be at this shop, or at Malfoy Manor. It no longer stung when he reminded me that he was not my friend. 

He was not my friend. I had nobody else to turn to. 

On the record, they sang of _Love Potion No. 9_ , of how a man who had no luck with his sweetheart went to a sorceress to get a potion to turn him more attractive.   
  
"I-" my throat refused to cooperate to complete my sentence. I tried again, attempting wryness and only achieving bleak sorrow. "I would like some of that _Love Potion No. 9._ " 

"I have never brewed a love potion," he said tersely, his mellowness vanishing in a jiffy. "I consider them repugnant." 

There had been rumors, as there often were in a school of curious and unkind students who mocked and bullied the outliers. Those rumors had claimed that Riddle had been born of a love potion, a beggar girl's get from a lord of some sort, abandoned in a gutter somewhere. 

When I wept again, I wondered if I was weeping for that beggar girl, or for the silly woman who had followed Alastor into a training programme in the tremulous hope that she might have finally found a person to belong to. Loneliness made fools of us all. Hadn't Riddle settled for a cripple?

"Have another biscuit," he said then.

"No." 

"Do, please."

The next biscuit had a heart of chocolate in it, and I laughed in pleased surprise, through the tears. 

"Aren't you glad that you had another?" 

"For all that you hate Dumbledore, you have his ways about you," I muttered. 

He had Dumbledore's ability to comfort without words, and the same bloody prescience when he chose to use it. 

"I am not your friend." 

"You have already said that!" I exclaimed, weeping again. "I know you are not my friend. Do you think I would come to you if I had even a single friend?" 

He set aside his duster and came to sit beside me. Then, in a first, he took my hands in his. Nobody had, before. 

My parents held their children at an arm's length, declaring that familiarity was not conducive to rearing children of virtue. They must be right. None of my siblings or I had been called lacking in virtue yet. 

I had dreamed, naively and in love, that Alastor might be the first to take my hand in his, as he asked me sweetly if he might court me. 

Instead, I was in Borgin and Burkes, at four in the evening, still in my trainee robes, huddled in a grimy corner of the shop, plied with tea and biscuits, and Riddle held my hands. His thumbs, thinner than mine, rubbed perfect circles over my knuckles. The artificiality and deliberateness of his movements gave away how uncomfortable he was. 

"You must regret letting me into the shop."

"You have your uses. I couldn't eat all the biscuits by myself." 

"What is wrong with me?" I demanded, wiping away my tears furiously, hating that I could not make them cease. "I tried, Riddle. I tried every day of my bloody life. I am tired of trying. Everybody else-" I shook my head fiercely, unwilling to even speak of my failure as a human to kindle friendships, to elicit love. 

Then, having nothing to lose, not even a friendship, for Riddle had said over and again that he was not my friend, I turned to hold him, weeping bitterly into his robes. He smelled of eggs and yeast, and of the curses that lingered in the shop's artifacts. He was strung taut, and I half-expected him to cast a Repulso, but his arms came about me in a studied manner. 

How many times had I watched others hold hands and kiss? How many romance novels had I read? If Alastor had kissed me, I would have tried to respond as I had observed other women do, as I had studied in my romance novels. 

Riddle embraced me as if this gesture of comfort was equally abstract to him as gestures of romance were to me. 

He had risked Azkaban to cure Abraxas Malfoy. He had set aside his skittishness to tactility to hold me. This truth comforted me oddly. I meant little to Alastor outside our work association. To Riddle, despite his claims, I meant something. 

I looked up, intending to thank him. The confusion and uncertainty that ran rampant in his expression was startling. 

"Go to Hogwarts," he said. 

"What for?" I asked, perplexed by the odd statement. 

"Dumbledore needs a Transfiguration Professor. He will need someone to replace him as the Head of House."

"I am in a training programme," I said weakly. It was the most prestigious training programme in Britain. 

"And it is most disruptive to my daily labor," he remarked. There was no bite to his voice. 

"I cannot-"

I paused. I could. I _could_. 

"Write to Dumbledore."

"Come with me. The Defence position is open," I said impulsively, clinging to the only constant I had then.

"Dumbledore will have my head on a pike before he allows me into the school while he is Headmaster," Riddle replied. 

"I can speak to him. You are qualified, more than!" 

"I am quite content where I am."

"Here?" I asked, flabbergasted. "I don't know what you are planning, Riddle! Whatever it is, I hope it is worth the years you are wasting away in a pawnshop!" 

Riddle had never lacked for intelligence. He had always been lacking in sense. 

"It is no dreary existence, I assure you. I enjoy the cursed artifacts, in peeling them free of curses, in cursing them anew in strange and mysterious ways, in tracing curses through bloodlines through centuries, across fen and wold."

I frowned at him. 

"I thought you might travel," I admitted. Whenever I had seen him reading in the library, there had been often books of exotic lands. 

"My circumstances shall not allow it." 

Circumstances? Meant he money? It could not be. He may not have Abraxas's fortune, but he had done fairly well for himself. He had traded favors for money at school, and with his investments poured into the bottom of the Muggle stock market during the war time, had netted himself a tidy return. He had never spoken of it. Abraxas, proud of him, had often regaled fellow guests at Ministry galas and the tale had spread as wildfire. 

Abraxas. 

Abraxas's shattered constitution would not lead to a long life. Others his age would outlive him. Riddle meant to stay close to Abraxas. He had taken a job that allowed him to tinker with the dark and the cursed. Was he even paid? 

He could travel elsewhere and return each night, if he chose to. I mulled over the problem. There was something I had not factored in. Then I realized what it must be. 

"It is your magic that sustains him," I whispered, horrified. 

This was the foulest of Dark Arts. They had practiced its ilk in the Americas once, at the height of imperialism, the masters stealing magic from slaves and leaving them squibs worked to death on plantations. They had practiced its ilk in our country once, when there had been fiefs and vassals. If Abraxas wished, he could drain his donor of magic, as those masters on fields of cotton had once. 

"Teaching shall suit you," he said, deathly calm. 

He must know that I had connected the dots. He did not exude alarm or fear. What would Dumbledore do if he knew? 

"Alastor is not cruel," I said weakly. "He is merely enthralled by the work."

Riddle's gramophone was playing _Pennies of Heaven_. I had followed Alastor for scraps and pennies, blooming in his every gesture of goodwill, and mistaking it for love. 

"Shall that suffice?"

"It will be more than I have now, more than I have ever had!" I said fervently. 

"Shall that suffice?" 

It would not. Oh, I wanted! I wanted so much! As a bottomless void, my heart keened to be seen.

Bastard. Riddle's manner of cruelty was a knowing one, calculated to flay. 

"I am not your friend," I told him, cutting in turn, shifting out of his clumsy attempt at an embrace. 

The slip second wide-eyed flinch on him was unnatural, and yet involuntary, as my words scythed through his facade. He was strangely forlorn then, in that grimy shop, dusty and alone, sitting beside chipped cups of cold tea, beside biscuits he had baked, bravely hiding the magic draining out of him to sustain another.

I may want, fiercely, but Riddle had been desperation given a name. He had taken a cripple, in a bid not to be alone, in a bid to be loved, even if by a dying man whom he fed magic. 

Pity seized me. He was young, as was I. Why must he rot here? 

"Travel," I told him briskly. "Travel the world, as you meant to, Riddle. I shall go to Hogwarts and be rid of my infatuation."

"Infatuation?" Riddle asked sardonically. 

It was no infatuation. I had fallen in love with Alastor so long ago, before I had realized the truth of it. Even as I stood readying myself to return to Hogwarts, I was disorientated by spikes of heart's grief. 

Before me, watching me as if I were an object of curiosity as one of the cursed artifacts he liked taking apart, remained Riddle. 

To Hogwarts, then.

\----

Dumbledore welcomed me with open warms. His beaming grin, warm and full of heart, soothed me. 

I could belong here, I realized, as I followed him up from the gates to the ponderous edifice of the castle. 

"The library has missed you."

"I have missed the library too," I said sincerely. 

The happiest I had been at Hogwarts had not been at Quidditch matches or in classrooms or in my common room or dormitory. It had been at that library, where I had whiled away nights reading and learning. The books had purred under my hands, pleased in my company. I had told myself then that I had not needed more.

"Does it-" I hesitated. Not long ago, Dumbledore had been my teacher. 

"Ask away, Minerva," he said merrily, pausing in his monologue about his many difficulties in procuring high-quality phoenix feed. 

On his robes, rainbows danced. His manner was as youthful as a schoolboy's, unburdened and happy, as if my arrival augured marvelous and joyful events to come. It was increasingly difficult to remain disheartened in the wake of his bonhomie. 

"Do you find yourself lonely in the castle?" I asked. 

"The Castle keeps me company," he said brightly. "Here, let me show you." 

Without ado, he took my hands in his. His magic was hearth fire and hot chocolate on a winter night. Through its skeins surged another presence, ancient beyond years and lived in, sorrowed and sacrosanct, as a mother greeting a babe she had birthed in blood. 

"The Castle!" I exclaimed. "Oh, Professor, is it always so present? Does it not overwhelm?"

"Albus."

"Albus," I said softly, still seeing him chide me in the Transfiguration classroom for attempting something audacious well beyond my ken. 

"Excellent! Now to your question. The Headmaster and the Castle are one, they say," Dumbledore continued. "Armando's magic was well-nigh indistinguishable from that of the Castle, by the end."

"A symbiotic relationship," I breathed.

"Yes, the Castle was wrought of the magic of hundreds of wizards. It feeds on magic to this day, but only the Headmaster is bound in service to sustain it."

The Headmaster of Hogwarts was a powerful wizard, they said in every textbook of history. How could he be otherwise, with the Castle's magic, with the magic of hundreds of wizards in his veins? 

The Headmaster of Hogwarts served only the Castle, they said. How could he serve another, when his magic too would join those before him, to sustain the Castle?

"Legend goes that Slytherin wanted to breed Basilisks and other Fantastical creatures to cull magic to feed the Castle," Dumbledore said. "The other Founders refused to consent to this barbaric animal cruelty. Instead, they came to consensus that there would be a wizard at all times, bound to service, willingly."

Had that been the root of their discord? 

What had motivated Dumbledore to willingly tie his life and magic to the Castle? He had set aside ambition and a life in the wider world to serve. His nobility endeared him to me even more.

"Since the Castle was their legacy, they assumed their children and descendants would be the Headmasters that served."

The heirs had been scattered, disparate, ruined by obsession and ambition. Every few years, there would be a brouhaha in one of the houses when a new portrait or passageway was found, as rumors of an heir returned to the Castle would then surge. 

"Does the Castle know when there is a Founder's descendant in its halls?" I asked curiously. "Is there sentience to that degree?" 

"An excellent question!" Dumbledore declared. "I hear Fawkes warbling for his supper, methinks! The House Elves shall see you to your quarters now, Minerva. I am overjoyed that you have returned to us!" 

Perhaps he was lonely too, I mused, as I followed a House Elf. How could he not be, as he watched hundreds of students come and leave, as he remained an alien and singular construct of himself and of an ancient Castle that ate magic? 

He had not answered my question.

The many mysteries and secrets of Albus Dumbledore, I thought warmly, as I stepped into his old quarters in Gryffindor Tower. 

\----

"And then the vampire ate my weasel!" Flitwick was saying. " _Not my weasel!_ I exclaimed. _Not my weasel, you dastardly cur!_ You see, it is deucedly difficult to duel a vampire. For one, a vampire does not have a wand. For another, a vampire does not understand duelling rules!" 

His tales of his travels were bloodthirsty and rife with adventure. I could not see why he had come to Hogwarts to teach. 

Sinistra was looking queasy as he carried on with aplomb about how he had used a dentistry charm to lop off the vampire's incisors. 

Dumbledore was laughing, utterly entertained by the tale.

The owls came in. Most flocked to Dumbledore, who maintained a large correspondence. One came to me, an eagle owl. I frowned. 

"A Malfoy owl," Dumbledore remarked. It was a plain postcard depicting a mountain peak and a lonely tower upon it. 

"Hohe Acht, in the Eifel mountain range," Dumbledore said, looking over my shoulder, abandoning his pile of letters to snoop in my affairs. "That is the Emperor William Tower. It commemorates the Emperor's silver wedding." 

Silver. Twenty-five years. I wished I would one day wake up beside someone and mark a twenty-fifth year. 

My loneliness had subsided in the wake of my return to the Castle, occupied as I was with lesson plans and matters of the House. The staff was comprised of spinsters and bachelors, and did not leave me on the sidelines. For the first time in my life, I was actively sought after for conversations. I had been even invited to tea once or twice by other teachers. 

I had not thought of Alastor but in passing, usually when the owls arrived, yearning to see him send a missive to me. 

This postcard, I knew, was not from him, even if it carried no message, and was unsigned. I thumbed out a creased corner. 

"Are you happy, Minerva?" Dumbledore asked. 

"I belong here," I said simply. 

\----------

"He is sweet on you!" Sinistra insisted, as we drank together in her rooms. 

I had never had a female friend. I had never drunk with anyone. I giggled, flushed and merry from our gossip, and shook my head. 

"He is!"

"He is bloody well not!" I exclaimed. "He gave me a handkerchief the once!"

"It was a silk handkerchief!" 

We squabbled, back and forth, until we collapsed into riotous laughter on her tattered velvet sofa. 

* * *

  
_1960s_

  
Albus took me to the Ministry often, when he had business of the School to conduct there. Many of the Board members were ensconced in cushy bureaucratic positions on the Wizengamot and summoned Albus there willy-nilly instead of hauling their saggy arses to Scotland.

Abraxas, I found, had taken his late father's seat on the Board. 

"Miss McGonagall," he greeted me. He did not rise. It was not discourtesy, I knew. He was often chair bound due to his atrophied legs, particularly in colder weather. He had aged rapidly, made gaunt by the chronic pain that beset him. He hung on to life, and suffered in dignity. For the first time, I feared what Riddle might do after Abraxas's death. 

"Abraxas!" Albus said brightly, coming to greet him. "It has been a colder winter than is normal in these parts, hasn't it? I hope Wiltshire is warmer. I understand congratulations are in order! Please convey our felicitations to Mrs. Malfoy and to the baby." 

Had Riddle undertaken his travels so that Abraxas might carry out his estate's duties in peace? How long did he mean to wander the world? How long could he, without the distance fraying them both?

"Can you leave the Castle for extended periods of time?" I asked Albus curiously once we had returned.

"Inadvisable," Dumbledore said. "The Castle acts of its own accord, when it senses the potential for a rupture to its sustenance."

"As a parasite!"

"Hardly!" Dumbledore spluttered. "It is a commensal association as long as there is no breach of understanding."

"Are you happy?" I asked him softly. 

"I belong here," he parroted my words of years ago back to me.

\------

  
When Riddle returned, he brought war with him.

I shouldered many of Albus's responsibilities at the school, so that he may assemble the Order to combat Riddle.

Albus invited me to tea. He had set out Brodies and shortbread.

"Minerva, Alastor expressed a desire to join the Order." 

I said nothing. All these years, and that name stung still. There had been nobody else afterwards. Sinistra said that first love burned the most. She must be right. She was often right.

I would have fallen in love with Albus. I loved him dearly, after all. It would not have shamed me. He was a kind man, and drew others to him as moths to a flame. Many had loved him, men and women both, and he had treated them with warmth, even if he had no reciprocation to offer. I wondered why I had not fallen in love with Albus. Had that first, senseless obsessive bout of love broken something deep in me? 

"Alastor is dedicated to the destruction of the Dark Arts," I said finally. "You will be fortunate to have him in the Order." 

Dumbledore was watching me with keen compassion. Perceptive bastard. 

"It was a long time ago," I muttered. "It is inconsequential." 

He sighed. That sigh indicated him digging in his feet, waiting to draw me out until I was purged of secrets. 

"Don't," I insisted. "I have no desire to speak of it."

"Have I told you of Ariana?"

He had not. He knew very well that he had not. I leaned in, fascinated. I found every detail, trivial or not, of his history enthralling. 

"She was my sister," he said quietly, peering into his teacup as if it held answers. "She died in a duel."

"In a duel?" I asked, horrified. What manner of duel could kill? Flitwick had drilled in duelling rules to all of us. First blood was the most extreme conclusion. Death had been outlawed long ago. 

"A brawl," he amended, and his sorrow was a stark knife that had carven into his face. "Gellert, Abe, and I had been arguing. It had then escalated to wands. She was caught in the crossfire."

Gellert. Gellert Grindelwald. That Dark Lord Albus had defeated by the Danube, whom he had sealed to die in Nurmengard. 

"I had been a lonely boy, awkward and unable to hold conversations about what my peers took interest in. I lived in the library, reading and learning. My interactions with others were in the manner of lending them my assignments or occasionally tutoring them at a Professor's behest. My life at home was abysmal, with a mother lost to the bottle and a father sent to Azkaban for crimes against Muggles. My sister was a slow child. My brother and I had little in common. Gellert had been the first to see me. How could I have caught myself from falling head over heels in ardent love?"

"I was a foolish man. The consequences were unfathomably destructive. This is my penance, and I gladly give myself to it." He smiled at me wanly. "I belong here." 

Overwhelmed by that tragic tale, I took his hands in mine and squeezed, offering my silence and touch in lieu of words I had not. He began shaking, ravaged by emotion, and I leaned to embrace him, as clumsily as Riddle had held me once in that dingy shop. 

"Minerva, bless you!" Albus whispered, weeping freely in my arms, and the naked gratitude and relief in his voice was staggering. 

Riddle had settled for a cripple he fed magic to. Albus had settled for a Castle he fed magic to, forswearing all else. 

"I am glad that you are here," Albus said finally, waving off my offer of a kerchief and summoning one silken and gaudy with rainbows embroidered onto it. 

\-----

  
At night, I sat in my room atop Gryffindor Tower, and looked at the stack of unsigned postcards I had received over the years. Nobody else had written to me from the outside world. 

I no longer made up imaginary friends in my head.

Everyone who knew me and found me worthy were in this Castle. 

It sufficed. 

* * *


	2. Her scarlet letter

_1970s_

Aurora Sinistra and I were fond of staying up late on the Astronomy tower during the summers. She would show me her constellations and regale me with boisterous myths of the Gods these stars had been named after. 

"Stop, stop!" I insisted, as she was telling me about Hera's revenge on yet another comely maid Zeus had seduced in the guise of an animal. Her dark humor was unmatched, and I was helpless but to collapse into a giggling pile. 

She had spread out tiger skin furs that smelled odd, and we were sprawled upon the furs, looking up at the stars, and plying ourselves with Scotch and tattie scones. 

"I have never been seduced," I admitted to her then. Drink turned me more morose and introspective, even in her irrepressibly exuberant company. 

"You should go to Burma," she advised. "None of the Irish lads wanted me. So I went traveling. In Burma, the wizards loved my exotic features. They fed me _mohinga_ from fresh caught fish. They made love to me under thatched roofs and on the sands, in the pagodas of Bagan and in the paddy fields of Yangon." 

"You did not marry any of them," I said wistfully. Once I had made up imaginary friends. Now, on lonely nights, I made up fantasy lovers. 

"I belong here," Aurora said simply. 

\------

"Minerva!"

It was Alastor. He was briskly walking to me. We were in the Ministry, where Albus and I had come to speak to the Board. I looked to where Albus was waiting for me, concern bright in his exhausted features. He had been travelling back and forth between London and Hogwarts, to convince the Ministry about the imminent danger Riddle posed. When had he last a night's sleep? 

I nodded to him. I could deal with Alastor. Albus hesitated, chivalrous to a fault. I offered him a wan smile and turned to meet Alastor. 

"May we speak in privacy?" Alastor said gruffly, refusing to make eye-contact. 

"In privacy?" I asked, rattled. 

I was thirty-five. I was Deputy at Hogwarts. And my voice quavered as I faced my first fear. Since that day, my Boggarts had taken on Alastor's form, mimicking once more his careless rejection of my tentative overtures.

He caught my arm and led me back to the emptied meeting room. I swallowed at the searing awareness of where he touched me. His scent, distinctive, of curse-fire and old parchment, woke in me wishes I no longer wanted a part of. 

When I surfaced to the moment again, he had ushered me into the room and slid the door closed behind us. 

"It seems to me," he began awkwardly. "It seems to me that I did you injustice once." 

I stared at him, mortified that he had raised an old wound once more. 

"I have no desire to discuss this," I said assertively. "I should be leaving now, Auror Moody." 

"I am willing to give you what you wish for," he said, stopping me in my tracks. 

"Why?" I breathed, clinging to my composure by a fast fraying thread. 

"The war is stressful," he said bluntly. "Seeking relief from a comrade in arms is the safest option." 

"A sexual relationship?" I asked, and was proud that I did not trip over those words I had never spoken before. 

"Well, yes, that is what you sought all those years ago," he said, irked, coloring once again in discomfort, averting his eyes. "Think it over. You know where to find me." 

He left me there, dazed, lightheaded and frightened, lonely and in want once more.

When I returned to Hogwarts, I found Albus waiting beside the gates, anxious and pacing. 

"What did he want?" he asked me, and his worry on my behalf was a soothing balm. 

It was pure friendship that he nursed for me, but there were other wants, and I was a woman that yearned to be touched intimately. 

"Nothing," I lied. 

He raised his eyebrows, but said no more as we walked together to the Castle. He knew. His perception alarmed me, for I feared his judgement, for I did not want to disappoint him. 

"I was young once," he said brightly then. 

He thought it folly, but he wrote it off as the folly of youth. 

"I am thirty-five," I said bitterly. "Women who went to school with me have children fifteen years of age." 

"Men who went to school with me are mostly six-feet deep in the ground," Dumbledore said, cheerful once more. "When pitch drunk, I have once or twice danced a jig on their graves and pissed upon them too for good measure." 

I never did enquire further when he went on so, ludicrous and extraordinary in his eccentricity. His silliness cheered me up, as it had always, and I was laughing at his rambling as we dined together. 

\----

I paced restlessly in my quarters afterwards, heart thudding and sweating profusely. _I belong here_ , I told myself again and again, whispering fervently. 

In a flash of impulse, I had gathered to me my wand and warmest cloak, and rushed down the stairs, down to the gates, and Apparated. 

He lived in a cookie-cutter terraced house in Small Heath, down in Birmingham. When I rapped the door knocker sharply, a curse came flying from a window, and I ducked and swerved, and watched it hit the empty waste bins to the side. 

"It is you," he muttered, sleep agog, in his nightshirt and cap. 

He let me in. Before I could come up with words, he had backed me against the wall, and was hitching up my skirts. 

\----

I walked down the empty streets, with only cats and owls about. Finally, exhausted, I wound up in the grandstand of St. Andrew's stadium, where I plumped down on the benches and watched the moon set.

I felt him before I saw him. Distinctive his magic had always been, and then I realized why. When Albus had taken my hands and I had known the ancient songs of the Castle, I had not made the association. Riddle's magic was touched by the Castle too, and the same sharp, bleak note of haunting sorrow thrummed constant through the crevices of his presence. 

"Spying on me?" I croaked. 

He removed his cloak and draped it over my shoulders. 

Then he sat beside me and offered me a flask of tea. Brodies. Bloody Brodies. He placed on the bench in the space between us a wrapped handkerchief. I opened it to find warm shortbread. 

"You won't look upon me," he remarked. 

Even his voice had changed. While many had reported the changes to his physique and eyes after his travels, nobody had spoken of his voice, of how it had changed from that low, clear tone to this high discordant note. 

I had not wanted to see him, though he sent me postcards often. 

I had not wanted to see him, because Albus Dumbledore was rearing for a war to save our country from Riddle. 

I had not wanted to see him, because I feared what it might do unto me if I saw him changed. 

So he had returned to our country, and his postcards were of Borgin and Burkes, and I had never once sought him. 

I had not joined the Order. Dumbledore had not pressed me to. I wondered, once again, what Albus knew. 

I twisted open the flask lid and let the tea warm me. Then, for old time's sake, I dunked a biscuit in the tea. 

"Must you?" His vexation had not changed. 

"I drink more scotch than tea now," I said. 

"Was it worth the trouble?" 

It had been pleasant. If I had not been fraught throughout, I daresay I might have even called it pleasurable. Alastor had been a generous lover, thumbing me open with patience, and then keenly observant to pick up on what wrought the most passionate responses from me. I had had my first orgasm at thirty-five, against Alastor Moody's wall in his cookie-cutter terraced home in Small Heath. My fingers had raked down his green wallpaper. 

Alastor had not been inexperienced. He had not remarked on my inexperience. Afterwards, he had offered me a glass of water, and had seen me to the door. 

He had not asked me to stay the night. I had not known how to ask for it. He had not held me after coitus. He had kissed me a few times during sex, filthy and open-mouthed, and my toes had curled in pleasure. He had not kissed me afterwards. We had shaken hands and I had wished him goodnight. 

"A comrade's trusted embrace in times of war," I paraphrased. 

Riddle's disapproval was palpable in the air. 

"Even Albus did not judge," I muttered. Albus was quick to judge situations and people, relying upon his instincts to act swiftly and decisively. 

Riddle said nothing to that. He had never apologized once for his failings. Why would he begin now? 

"Was it the bond?" I asked finally. 

My hand hovered over his, and I could not look away from what he had done to himself. His hands, once stained by potions and ink, that had inspired aspiring artists in our schooldays, were now knobby-knuckled and bony, covered by near translucent pale skin that rendered in the dawnlight plain veins and arteries.

He opened his palm in offering. I placed mine in his, and the startling cold of his skin was unnatural. 

"What did you do?" I demanded wanly, wishing not to hear a word of truth. 

Dark Magic. Dark Magic of the foulest kind. He had not shied away twenty-five years ago. Why would he shy away now? 

"If I were to die in the war, I wanted my magic to survive," he said calmly. 

Had he siphoned off portions of his magic somehow? How could he undertake that? Our magic came from our soul, or so the theoreticians had held since the fifteenth century. To carve out magic, one would then need to carve out one's soul. I turned to look at him and gasped. He had lost his hair, and his cheeks were gaunt, and his eyes were crimson. A wraith, shrunken of soul and of body.

"What have you done?" I asked, grieving. 

"I watched many die in the air raids during the Great War, grasping for breath, poisoned by smoke. Every heave of their desperate lungs brought in poison, sealing their fate. They died aware, and their brain was the last to die. There was no mercy in that end."

Wizards who bled magic died similarly, suffocating, slowly emptied out of life, involuntarily leeching magic from the surround, from the stones and the woods, and prolonging their anguish due to the incompatibility of the magic of nature and what lived in our souls. 

Riddle might die in this war. He was on the frontlines, they said. There was a prize on his head. He did not want Abraxas to die grasping for magic as a Muggle would grasp for air in breathless panic. 

"You would not be content with merely one," I said bleakly. He would have made sure that Abraxas had multiple sources of his magic to draw on from, in the event of his death. 

So we sat there, and watched the sun rise, he and I. We had been called the brightest of our generation. He had carven up his soul to leave his lover fragments of his magic if he were to die. I had gone to Alastor and come away dissatisfied. 

"Will you linger as a ghost?" I asked quietly. Would death accept a soul cut up into pieces? Would death take the life without taking the magic too? 

"I don't know," he replied. 

I stared at him, horrified by his nonchalance. 

"It was my choice," he reminded me. 

"You make appallingly poor choices." 

That earned a wan and crooked curl of lips from him, and his expression softened. Gone was the happiness he had worn in that grimy shop once, when he had been dusting and baking. Gone was the curiosity and optimism that had been his as a boy, even though he had had neither family nor prospects nor friends. What manner of happiness could one hope to know with a tattered and torn soul? 

His mother, they said, had tricked a man into bedding her using a powerful love potion. Her love had been obsession. 

"Remain at Hogwarts," he told me. 

_Do not return to Alastor_ , he implied. Who was he to tell me what my life ought to be? He had made his poor choices. It was not his place to condemn mine. 

"Minerva, you have not the resilience for this manner of arrangement," he said bluntly. 

"You are one to talk!" 

"I selected someone who I knew with certitude would be able to provide me all I sought," he pointed out. 

"All that you sought? Did you seek to carve up your soul? Did you seek to live out your days being drained of magic with his every breath? You chose this folly to end your loneliness. Let me choose mine." 

"And if I had been wiser then, I would not have!" he barked, and immediately flinched at the import of what he had spoken.

"You did not mean that," I said kindly. 

He shook his head and said with an earnestness I had never seen before in him, "I meant what I said. There is no joy in the choices I have made. I am not lonely. I am deeply loved. Is that a worthy trade for my soul?" He cleared his throat, and continued, "Behold and beware." 

I beheld him and saw love's ravages, and saw his follies heaped upon each other as he sought to save his heart.

Albus had buried a man alive. He had then foresworn all and married himself to a sentient castle. Had he not spoken to me, obliquely, to offer me a similar warning? 

They were men of extremes. 

I was only Minerva, a woman that wanted to be held and made love to. Alastor had made love to me well and kindly. What if he had no desire to hold me as his? I was already better off than I had been, having obtained half of what I sought. Hadn't Aurora spoken of her affairs in her youth, of those handsome youth of Burma? Let this be my affair of sexual pleasure. 

"You have not the resilience for it," Riddle told me plainly, seeing clearly the decision I had come to. 

"If I wanted bastardly advice from a snoop, my employer is quite adept at it," I retorted, feeling calm and centered once more. 

He grunted and rose to his feet. 

"Stop spying on me, Riddle."

He sketched a mocking bow and vanished. 

\-----

I returned to Hogwarts. 

Albus was waiting in the Entrance Hall, in his nightclothes dappled with sparkling rainbows. 

"Stop spying on me!" I insisted. 

"Is that shortbread?" 

We wound up on the stairs, in that summer morning, and despite Horace's attempts to corral us to breakfast, we sat there, leaning against the pillars, nibbling on shortbread and drinking Brodies tea, and gossiping as old biddies about the Ministry and the Board. 

"He should have restricted his explorations to the culinary arts," Albus remarked finally. 

"Did you suspect it?"

"Yes," Albus admitted, and sighed as if relieved to finally unburden himself to another this secret he had carried for too long and alone. "He did not exhibit any of the classic signs of magical drain. The Castle-" he hummed thoughtfully, striving to put words to coherence.

"The Castle's magic is in him." 

"Yes, it began diffusing into him at a sharp velocity after he had healed Abraxas. Neither Armando nor I had heard of a similar event before. Even when heirs had come to the school, and spent years here, the Castle had not crept into their crevices as it did into Tom's magic. I presumed, mistakenly, that banning him from the Castle might spell the end of the phenomenon. There had been an affinity, from the beginning, but it was unbounded after his adventure in healing, as if there was abruptly more _room_ in him."

The Castle had rushed to claim the vacant part in his soul. 

"How is it done?"

"Magic most foul," Albus said tiredly. 

Murder. 

I held the still warm flask in my bare hands. It bore the distinctive traces of Riddle's magic. 

"May I join the Order?" I asked hoarsely. 

Albus handed me a silk kerchief. I mopped my eyes furiously, trying not to think about Riddle in that library scrambling to find a cure, more than two decades ago, disheveled and desperate, made raw by love.   
  
"It is for his sake too," Albus said gently. 

_There is no joy in the choices I have made_ , Riddle had said. 

"Must it be death?" 

"I cannot see another way to repatriate his soul." 

"I wish to see your researches," I asked, girding myself up for the war. "If there is one dear lesson he and you have taught me, it is that there is always a way."

Albus grinned at me, proud and happy. Then his eyes flashed with sorrow, and he came to brush my disarrayed hair from my face.

"Behold and beware, Minerva," he said half-solemnly, waving at himself. "I fear you may find yourself less resilient than you assess." 

"I can take care of myself," I told him firmly. 

I squared my shoulders and returned to my tower. I was truly a woman as of this morning, one who had known passion in a man's arms. It ought to have felt different, I mused. When I looked at my mirror, I saw only myself, the same as I had been yesterday. A white hair stood bold near my hairline, and I removed it in grim determination. Over the last two years, they had started creeping in, and I had been waging an unflagging war to remove them whenever they sprouted. Riddle had lost all of his. We had once been the brightest of our generation. 

Perhaps it took a while, I decided. I was thirty-five, not a giggling lass of fifteen or sixteen. Perhaps it would take a few rounds to see the transformation in my confidence as a woman. Alastor had asked me to come by again when I wished to. A standing invite. I would make use of it. 

And when I lay in my bed, I knew loneliness once more, a cold that refused to leave, gathering relentless into the heart of me. 

\----

"I don't feel different," I told Aurora , as we drunk at our usual spot on the Astronomy Tower and watched the snowflakes dancing merry in the Christmas winds.

Twelve times. It ought to have been enough. Twelve was a good number. Twelve uses of Dragon blood. Twelve months in a year. 

Twelve was a good number. 

Aurora, always quick to offer suggestions and advice, said nothing to my query. 

That is when I knew something was amiss. I turned to her, worried. The wealth of pity on her expression petrified me. 

"Aurora?" I managed finally. 

"We needn't speak of it," she said gently. 

"What do you mean?" I asked, frightened. 

"You are in over your head, Minerva," she replied, voice a hush, as if afraid to spook me. "I did not love my Burmese boys."

I made to negate her insinuation, but she carried on, "I did not expect them to love me."

Silence fell between us. I watched the stars, blinking back tears. 

"There, visible today, is the shy Merope," Aurora said, placing her head on my shoulder, grabbing my hand in hers and pointing at the sky where a shy sister joined the ebullient rest. 

"They say that Merope is the faintest of the stars because she was the only one of the Pleiades to have married a mortal. Her sisters had relations with gods and bore them sons, but Merope married Sisyphus and lived on the island Chios. Merope is often called the lost Pleiad, because she was at first not seen by astronomers or charted like her sisters. They say that she hid her face in shame because she had an affair with a mortal man, another says she went to Hades with her husband, Sisyphus." 

I let her words wash over me, as she told me the myths she knew and loved well, of her stars. 

"What should I do?" I asked quietly. 

"End the arrangement," she said, without hesitation. Then she shook her head and said wryly, "I know you shan't."

\----

So we carried on, Alastor and I. 

Sometimes, he was fresh from a war zone, and he would be ferocious as he made love to me, still reeking of blood and death. 

Sometimes, he was sleepy and semi-lucid, and would pet me fondly when we were done. 

Sometimes, he was in a chatty mood, and would discuss Order affairs afterwards.

I had never stayed the night. 

I would return, alone, physically sated, and yet oddly incomplete, to Hogwarts, where I belonged. 

Sometimes Albus would wait up for me. As the war raged, it was often the House Elves that would greet me with a cup of cocoa on the Headmaster's behalf. 

\----

Albus had been unobtrusively glancing at me throughout the Order meeting. While he fancied his attention subtle, I had known him for years. 

When it ended, he abandoned his pretence and bustled over to me, well-meaning and uncertain. 

"Yes?"

"Not here!" He insisted, and tugged me to the Floo. He loathed the Floo, and preferred always to Apparate. I frowned at him. He did not speak a word, ushering me into the fireplace.

We were spit out into his office at Hogwarts. He grabbed my hand and led me to the antechamber to his private quarters, away from the portraits that snooped almost as fervidly as he did. 

"What is it?" I asked, worried. "Riddle?" 

"It is his birthday tomorrow," Albus said dismissively. "I doubt Abraxas shall let him traipse about to stir up trouble on the eve of his birthday."

I blinked, nonplussed at his confidence. Riddle did as he pleased. He was an impulsive madman who had cut up his soul to leave Abraxas _sustenance_ after his death. 

"It is Alastor." 

"I have told you to bloody stay out of my dealings!" I said, exasperated. 

Between Riddle and him, was I not to have a moment's peace? Each time I trysted and returned, I would find a plain postcard ferried to me by a Malfoy Owl at breakfast. Riddle fancied himself witty, for he had begun writing in his chickenscratch verses from what Albus had helpfully informed me was a famous Muggle novel. The Scarlet Letter. 

_My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one!_ he had written once, when I had come to breakfast after a sleepless night, stricken by what I was doing to myself.

 _"Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its own."_ , he had written, when I had sent him a howler in return. 

Albus had been of no help, elucidating at length the many nuances and wealth of detail in the lines Riddle chose. Why the two of them could not start a literary club and leave the rest of us in peace eluded my fathoming. One had married a castle. One had cut up his soul. Neither were paragons of good sense, and that did not turn them averse to snooping into my affairs. 

My furious scowl must have portended to Albus my wrath, because he took a deep breath and ushered me to a flamboyant chaise of China green decorated with a throw of peacock feathers. Then he sat beside me and took my hands in his.

"Albus," I asked, frightened by his unusual delicacy. 

"There is an epidemic in Muggle London," he said quietly. 

I frowned. What had that to do with us? Was there a student in our midst, as Abraxas, who had fallen prey to the disease? 

"They have begun calling it the exotic gay disease," he continued. 

"Albus, have you-" I brought my hand to my chest, frightened for him. 

"No, no, I am as gay as a flamingo on narcotics, but it is not a gay disease."

"What do you mean?" I asked, horror rising slowly in me as I began dimly realizing the truth he struggled to speak of.

"GRID, the Americans called it. Gay-related Immune Deficiency. Then they began calling it 4H, as it affected homosexuals, Haitians, hemophiliacs and heroin users. Now there is conclusive evidence that it is a sexually transmitted disease. There is significant spread in London."

I shook my head, struggling to breathe, as panic overwhelmed me. 

"Minerva, Alastor tested positive," he said gently. 

"You snooped into his medical records when he went to St. Mungo's."  
  
He said nothing to that. 

It was Albus. He must have left standing instructions to his spies there to keep him apprised. 

"He did not tell you," Albus said quietly. 

I could remain strong, I decided. 

"Is it contagious in close quarters? Are you in danger?" 

"No." Albus squeezed my hand. 

"Will I die?"

Albus flinched. Then he sighed and unearthed a creased pamphlet, Muggle, from his pocket. He must have gone to Muggle London to find this. It was well-read and annotated. 

_"Once integrated, the virus may become latent, allowing the virus and its host cell to avoid detection by the immune system, for an indeterminate amount of time."_

"How long have you known?"

"A week." 

He had wanted to allow Alastor the chance to tell me. 

_"The person may become more susceptible to opportunistic infections, caused by fungi, bacteria, parasites or other viruses, due to acute immunodeficiency syndrome."_

"Should I leave?" 

"Absolutely not!" He exclaimed, stricken. "Minerva!" 

"He must have slept with others during the past years of our engagement," I said softly. My hands were clenched about the pamphlet, knuckled white. 

Albus threw out propriety and his usual reserve, and hugged me, prattling on desperate nonsense about Fawkes's latest exploits. I clung to him. 

\--------

I received a postcard in the morning at breakfast. It had a single line.

"For desperate maladies, desperate cures."

Albus patted my hand. He was sticking to tea and toast, picking at his food lackadaisically. I had thought that he was feeling poorly because of the war. I had not known that it was my situation that had stricken him. 

"Eat something," I ordered him. 

"You should go to him." 

I had not gone to Alastor for two weeks. He had not enquired as to why. I had hoped, desperately, that he might tell me himself of the virus. He had chosen not to. 

Albus was not speaking of Alastor. 

"I am not Abraxas."

"You are his friend." 

"He has no friends, and no need for them." 

"A wise decision on his part. If he had more, he would be chained to the oven baking biscuits," Albus said, affecting a smile for my sake. There were dark circles about his eyes. 

"Cheer up," I insisted. "Your spies found the news weeks ahead of his."

"Oh, he is a boy playing at war," Albus said, beaming wickedly, cheered up as ever when someone praised him for one-upping Riddle. 

Their detente of old had progressed from classroom to a theatre of war. On that morning, with a virus eating its way through my body, with a lover who had conveniently skipped telling me of it, I could not bring myself to rue the madmen who had brought war upon us. 

\--------

Riddle was waiting for me impatiently at Malfoy Manor, pacing in the entrance hall. He grabbed my hand and led me through multiple passageways, lined with portraits suspiciously vacant of subjects, through empty halls and antechambers, until he reached a bedroom and closed the door behind him. 

There were sheets of flax on the bed, dyed lavender, and there was an ornate throw of white peacock feathers, sprawled upon it. 

"Albus would approve of your palette choices," I said. 

"Bloody tits, Minerva! I told you to stop!" 

"You are not my minder."

The tremors in his hands had become starkly noticeable. His manner and gait were altered. His eyes flickered restless, as if struggling to stay moored in the present. There were marks on his wrists, as if he had begun to claw himself to remain lucid. 

His mind, they said, was unravelling. The soul, I knew from my research, yearned to be whole. It was splintering his body and mind, as it desperately sought its completion once more. Magic was pouring out of him, in volatile waves, as water from a broken pipe. 

"Riddle, you must end this," I said, anguished at the torment that exuded from every pore of him.

"Unlike you, I came to this juncture in knowing," he muttered. 

He had not. He had been brash and impulsive. His power had saved him, for a very long time. Even his power was not enough to stay the tide of his soul's desperation to be whole. 

"There is a cure," he said briskly. He went to extract sheaves and sheaves of parchment from his desk, and handed them to me. "Have Albus review it."

He was not confident in his work. How severely had his mind frayed, for him to doubt himself? 

I skimmed over his work, and suppressed a sob at the rambling, discombobulated nature of it. His précis had once been succinct and lucid, as he tethered the theoretical to the realized, in dazzling display of brilliance and power and _unerring instinct_ that only he had demonstrated in my experience. Albus had unfaltering instincts when it came to unspooling and analyzing magic. Riddle's intuition was when it came to the new, when it came to creation. 

"Will you brew?"   
  
He startled, as if he had forgotten that I was there. "There is a boy," he said quietly. "Severus Snape. He shall brew it." 

I taught Severus Snape. He was a studious lad, bullied but plucky. More a Gryffindor than a Slytherin, in how he snooped about and got himself into all manners of mischief. 

_"Oh, I have faith in my brewing,"_ Riddle had once said, obscenely confident. 

He trusted a schoolboy more than he trusted himself with the potion. 

"Riddle," I began, pitying, sorrowed. 

The best of our generation, they had called us. He was teetering on full-blown insanity.

"I meant to give this to you," he said, collecting himself. He picked up a thin book, old and dearly cared for, and often thumbed through. 

_A Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel A. Hawthorne._

I knew why he gave it to me then. He did not think we would meet again. Or, worse, he thought that he might not have any remnant of lucidity left when we met next. 

I rushed to him, and he opened his arms to me. 

This time when he held me, his magic burned mine, cold and scattered in splinters as it had become. 

"Minerva McGonagall," he said quietly. "The finest of our generation."

I shook my head. My researches had led me nowhere, on how to seal his soul once more where it belonged. Albus had fair speculation as to where his soul fragments were, for Riddle's magic carried in it traces of the Castle's magic, that Albus could pinpoint anywhere. 

"I cannot listen to music anymore, as I have become sensitized to it," he said tiredly. "I long for its consolation. It does not matter now." 

"Riddle." 

"I am loved."

"Yes, you are," I said boldly, rising to kiss his gaunt brow. His eyes were wild, as those of a rabid animal that knew its slaughter was near, and he buried his head in my hair, trembling. 

I held him. 

"Bless you," he managed to say, despite his loss of composure. 

"Bless _you_ ," I replied.

Whatever he was, whatever he would become, he had held me in friendship, even if he had been ever reluctant to name it so. His was always a heart spoken in pause and silence. It served whom it served in decisive act, in mind's labor. 

A still, thin sound, funereal, clung to me when I left him. 

\--------

Albus reviewed the parchments I brought back to Hogwarts. I sat across him in an armchair and watched him work, diligent as he scribbled notes and double-checked calculations. 

"The Castle senses it too," he said then, abruptly. The wealth of sorrow in his gaze spoke for itself. 

"It won't be merciful, will it?" I asked hesitantly. 

The virus had become a secondary concern. My mind was preoccupied with Riddle's deterioration. He fared poorly, and yet he was at the beginning of his mind's degeneration to lunacy. Abraxas loved him dearly. Would he put his lover down, as one would a diseased animal? 

If it came to that, could Albus give him a merciful end? Alastor, Crouch, and many others were baying for blood. They would make a spectacle of it, drag him through ditch and thoroughfare, until the mob had extracted its pound of flesh. 

If it came to capture, I resolved to be his mercy. I did not care if the Minister stood in my way. I did not care if Albus stood in my way. Riddle deserved a clean ending.

"If it comes to that, I will see to it myself," Albus said gently. "He was my student." 

"He means nothing to you."

"On the contrary," Albus corrected me, returning to his calculations. "He has been a friend to you. I am indebted."

That Albus would set aside his opinions and judgement, because of what Riddle meant to me, brought home renewed the epiphany that I belonged at Hogwarts, where I was loved by Albus dearly. 

I thought of Alastor. I could not muster the energy even to hate him. 

"I had been very foolish," I admitted. 

"The next time Tom and I agree upon a matter, you had best take our assessment as truth sacrosanct," Albus said cheerfully. 

\------

When I retired, I took Riddle's book to read in bed. 

_1942, Tottenham Court, London_. Riddle's hand was a chicken scratch then too. 

> A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
> 
> The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.  
>    
> 

Riddle had grown up in an orphanage, clear-eyed and optimistic despite his lack of fortune. Then he had found lucre and love, and neither had done him any good. What awaited him? A cemetery or a prison? 

In the margins, he had written, _What other prison is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!_

Aurora had told me tales of the stars she loved, in a bid to distract me from my heart that had chained me to folly. 

Behold and beware, Albus and Riddle had both cautioned me. 

_Why am I unchanged?_ I had wondered, peering at the mirror, seeing no traces of happiness or satiation after my trysts with Alastor.   
  
\------

The potion Severus Snape brewed cured me. 

I watched him with an eagle eye, to see if he knew whom he had prepared the concoction for. He would blush and stumble away whenever he caught my gaze. It made me fear. 

I would never hold the respect of students again, were the news to spread. The stigma of this disease was all-consuming in our society. Fudge called it the gay pandemic, and had banned many venues where gay men socialized, saying that putting an end to vice would put an end to the disease. 

"Does he know?" I asked Albus, who could be relied upon ferreting information from anyone and anywhere. 

"No." 

Albus's appetite had returned with gusto after my cure. He had heaped a large serving of bacon upon his plate. I glared at him. Sighing, he plucked exactly a single shoot of asparagus and waved at me in placation. 

Snape watched me so whenever he was in my presence. 

"He looks at me oddly."

"He carries a torch for you." 

I huffed at the inanity and left Albus to his nonsense and his pile of bacon. 

* * *

_1980s_

Severus returned to spy for Albus. Whatever deal they had struck, both kept mum. Albus vouched for his young turncoat protege. Alastor wanted him thrown into Azkaban. 

There was an uproar at the Order meeting, as the Potters and Black and many others raged at Albus's decision. The lad, Snape, was remarkably unruffled, and only the clenching of his fingers in the pocket of his robes gave him away. I suppressed a pang of pity for him. 

"Minerva, this is bloody madness!" Alastor barked gruffly. "Tell Albus he must hand over the murderer to the Aurors!"

Alastor carried the virus still. He had lost an eye and a leg. His artificial eye zoomed about paranoid in its socket. I could not bring myself to know sympathy for his plight. Did he continue to seek liaisons? Had he infected others due to his carelessness? 

"If Albus trusts him, so do I!" I said firmly. It was the first time Alastor had addressed me in more than eighteen months. 

Snape had bright splotches of color on his cheeks then. I frowned. Despite what Albus said, I feared that the clever lad may have put together two and two, and come to the conclusion that the Dark Lord had wanted the potion brewed for me. 

"The boy carries a torch for you," Albus had insisted, each and every time I had gone to him with my suspicions. 

\----

Severus connived to sit beside me often, though he rarely made conversation. His gaze was shameless and bashful both. He had no compunction about staring at me when I spoke to others. He would stutter and stumble if I spoke to him. 

"A torch!" Albus insisted, bloody romantic that he had become. 

"I am forty-six! Men my age don't glance at me twice. Why would a perfectly normal nineteen year old carry a torch for me? Be reasonable, Albus!" 

"Perhaps he likes older women who can teach him the ways."

"The ways?" I asked flatly. 

He hummed merrily. "The ways of women," he elaborated, unrepentantly gay. 

\-----

I was on the Astronomy Tower, alone, one night in October. Aurora was with her family. 

Severus was rushing up from the gates, with his mask in his hands, staggering as if wounded. Frightened for him, I summoned a broomstick and flew down to him. 

"Severus?" I asked, panicking, at the unceasing tremors in his body and the blood bubbling at his mouth. 

"It is all right," he said soothingly, wiping his mouth, gladly leaning into me when I offered my hand, free of pride unlike many men. He smelled of herbs and potions, of the metal of blood and of the pungency of urine. "The Dark Lord has become rather fond of the Cruciatus this year. His mind wanders too frequently to make use of anything requiring more focus." 

The thought of Riddle, unravelled to where he remembered only a single curse, was unbearable. Grief ate me alive each night when I thought of him, when I looked at the postcards stacked neat on my desk, when I looked at the parchment he had researched upon and that Albus had refined in their search for a cure for my plight. I had asked Albus if we could give the cure to St. Mungo's. He had shaken his head wryly, saying that we would be looking at a sentence in Azkaban. 

Severus had steadied enough to throw upon himself disinfecting and cleaning spells in quick succession, and had conjured himself a mirror to neaten his hair. 

"You are remarkably composed."

"It has been his favorite curse of the year." 

The casual bravery in his words overwhelmed me. I was not scared of Riddle or of Albus, but they were powerful men. Albus was in full possession of his senses and had never been given to impulsiveness. Riddle had lost most of his sanity, to hear the rumors speak of it. 

Severus, brave Severus, walked into a madman's presence every day, and came back battered but resolute. He had always been a plucky one. I had not thought that the boy who stood up to bullying and unfairness, fond of mischief-making and brewing dark potions, would be a turncoat one day. I was not surprised that he had chosen to follow Riddle. Many of them from Slytherin had. I was surprised that he would return to Albus, that he would endanger himself every day in service to the Order. 

I wished to hear his tale. 

"Would you like a nightcap next weekend?" 

He blushed, despite the sorry state of him. He shook his head and then bobbed it a few times. 

"Well, which is it?" I asked, irked. "Aye or Nay?" 

"No, no, I meant-" he swallowed and scowled. "Yes!" 

\-----

And that weekend, the Dark Lord fell in Godric's Hollow. 

Severus came to my quarters in Gryffindor tower, exuberant, bearing a bottle of Scotch and a bouquet of winter crocuses. 

He found me at my desk, bent over old postcards, quietly reading to myself the verses written in a familiar hand. 

" _The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits,_ " Riddle had written to me once. 

He had not confined himself within ancient limits. He had tested and broken the boundaries of magic, to heal, to ruin, until there had been nothing left of him but a heart that knew it loved and a mind that had fallen to tatters in the wake of his soul's rupture. 

"Minerva," Severus said quietly, his cheer vanishing. His hand came, trembling, to my shoulder. 

"Take your celebration elsewhere."

"Let me accompany you in mourning then," he said steadily, wise beyond for his years. 

I shook my head tiredly. 

There was a soft knock on the door there. Albus. 

"Severus, my darling boy, perhaps you might wish to lead the toast downstairs," Albus suggested. 

"Lead?" Severus spluttered. 

"Go on, now," Albus persuaded him. Drunk on trust, the lad skittered away. 

Albus closed the door behind him and came to me. His eyes were blotchy from weeping. 

"It is over, then?" I asked. 

"Harry's life has only begun," he said softly. "We must see to Severus's exoneration. Then there is the matter of Sirius, Peter and Remus. The Lestranges and many others are at large. It is not over, Minerva." 

I glared at him.

"It is not over, Minera," he said again, weighed down by mourning. 

"I mean to hold a vigil for him tonight," I said, resolute. "The rest must wait for tomorrow."

"A wake, then," Albus said gently. "Together."

> Hester Prynne’s term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast

In Albus's voice, Hester's plight was tinged with melancholy. 

He and I, in our loneliness of two, carried on. 

* * *


	3. Hold the line

  
_1980s_

"So the boy is to go to his aunt?" Aurora asked me. "To Muggles?" 

"Lily's sister," I confirmed. "They have a boy of the same age." 

Young Harry would grow up with a sibling. Perhaps it would soothe him in his childhood, to hear tales of his mother from her sister, to play with toys and trains with his cousin. 

"Any news of Severus?" Aurora asked.

I shook my head. 

Severus was in the custody of the Aurors at Azkaban. He had been pale when Alastor had come to arrest him, but had not spoken a word.

\----

Albus was busy with the Death Eater trials, seeking amnesty or ameliorated sentences for many, claiming they were pawns manipulated or blackmailed into their deeds. 

When I had expressed my horror at this fraudulent representation, he had said, "You know what Crouch and Alastor wish to see done to them! I would rather see sentences for capital punishment handed down than the torture they seek to enact in the name of justice!" 

"So you mean to say that Riddle controlled their minds," I said softly. 

Riddle had been charismatic and manipulative. He had not heeded morality or virtue. However, he had not manipulated his followers with mind magic, as Albus meant to claim. 

"He shan't stand trial, shall he?" Albus retorted. "I mean to save who I can from our medieval system of justice. If that requires painting culpable a dead man, so be it!" 

\------

I made my way up the arboreal path to Malfoy Manor. Most of the perimeter was secured by Ministry wards. Narcissa let me in. 

"I am afraid it is rather disorderly," she apologized, leading me through ransacked rooms and passageways of askew portraits. 

There was broken glass and ceramic on the floors. There were stains of curses on the walls. The Ministry had raided the Manor after Riddle's fall. Narcissa and Abraxas were under house arrest. Lucius had been hauled off to Azkaban to wait for trial. 

She led me to a door I was familiar with and murmured that she would return to fetch me in an hour. 

Riddle had led me there the last time I had seen him.

In the room, on those sheets of lavender-dyed flax, with the throw of white peacock feathers draped over his feet, lay the master of the house. He was shrunken and hollowed, desiccated flesh, with his eyes, bright-blue, the sole remnant of the boy who had been my classmate. He was paralysed from the neck down. 

On the mantel, a gramophone played _Love Potion No. 9_.

"Mr. Malfoy," I greeted him. 

"Professor." His voice was a wisp of its former strength. 

"His magic did not suffice."

Abraxas said nothing. The bright-eyed hunger in him revealed the truth. 

"You have not imbibed of it!" I exclaimed. The idiot! He would die! He was dying! Riddle had cut up his soul to prevent his death! How dare this fool spit on love's sacrifice?

"He failed to see, despite my utmost, that there is no meaning in me without him," he said quietly. " _Live_ , he entreated me, when he first cured me and bound his magic to me. _Live_ , he begged. So I lived for him." 

"He died for you." 

Riddle had found in himself the coldbloodedness to slaughter a baby, were it to end the war. He had wanted the war over, before his sanity fell. He had not realized what the rest of us had, that his sanity had fallen. What sane man would kill a baby in a cradle? 

"He died because he played God," Abraxas said, with a wan, fond smile for that orphan he had held dear.

He was keen to return to Riddle, to join him in death as they had once conjoined their lives. Never before I had seen a man joyously awaiting his end. 

In a library, where once I had aided Riddle to save this man's life, neither Riddle nor I had known whereto the path would lead. 

"Is there anything I may do for you?" I asked softly. 

"The gramophone," Abraxas whispered. "It was the first of my gifts to him, and perhaps one he cherished the most. Narcissa was able to hide it before the Aurors came. Could you take it with you?"

The wistful longing in Abraxas's eyes was potent. I remembered how Riddle would play blaring music on the gramophone in that dingy pawnshop where he cared for cursed artifacts. By the end, he had become too sensitized to music. _I long for the consolation of music_ , he had confessed to me, when we had met for the last time. 

"The Aurors would incinerate it. I would rather that it was in the keeping of one who loved him." 

One who loved him. I had loved Riddle, despite his flaws and crimes. He had been kind to me, in the ways he knew to be. He had cared, even if by snooping and judging. He had saved my life, and asked for nothing in turn. _I am not your friend_ , he had insisted, for decades. He had feared abandonment as fiercely as I had. 

Then Abraxas startled, eyes wide in fear. 

"What is it? Should I summon Narcissa?" 

There must be a monitoring spell, for Narcissa clattered in right then, with a babe at her hips, her wand aloft. 

"The prophecy," Abraxas said, choking on spit, eyes bugging out of his emaciated skull. 

"Papa, you must not exert yourself!" Narcissa exclaimed, distressed. 

" _Ash, hawthorn, holly_ , the sibyl said." 

She dumped the boy in my surprised arms and rushed to his side, easing his collar, bringing a sip of water to his lips, casting various spells of diagnosis on him and blanching as death crawled upon his skin. 

"Papa!" 

\-----

I did not shrink the gramophone. Riddle, in that grimy pawnshop, had ever maintained a net of magic-filtering wards on the turn tables, claiming that his turn of the century Edison did not enjoy currents of magic. It had been something about distortions to the diaphragm. He had been vocal about it. 

"Professor." 

Narcissa approached me hesitantly. 

"The Ministry refused me permission to arrange a funeral at the Manor," she said. 

Lonely child, she stood willow-thin in the room, with a babe in her arms, standing guard over her dead father-in-law, with a husband in Azkaban and a sister on the run, another estranged, and the rest of her family dead or on the run. 

"I shall speak to Albus," I promised her. 

"I shall have him buried by the House Elves," she replied, and in her finally I saw the courage Sirius, Andromeda, and Bellatrix had in spades. "The hawthorns are in bloom in the western gardens. He was fond of the flowers."

 _Ash, hawthorn, holly_ , Abraxas had whispered, with his dying breath. What prophecy had he referred to? The prophecy Albus had heard was not this. 

"An unseasonal bloom," I remarked. 

"Yes," she said quietly. "I had been worried, but had lacked the herbological knowledge to assess the reasons. Voldemort had promised to take a look at them after he returned that night."

"Have you spoken to the parole committee?"

"They will not allow Lucius to attend the burial," Narcissa said, exhausted. "Papa was loved when he lived. What does it matter who buries him?" 

"Let me stay with you," I offered. Impulsively, I made to take the child from her. Blue-eyed, bonny-faced, gold-haired, the cherub giggled and thrust its plump arms to touch me. 

I had never held a babe before. A strange sense of desolation wracked through my body. Narcissa's expression turned bleak, and the sympathy in her eyes was haunting. Before I could speak, she offered me her son. 

\-----

The hawthorns bloomed white in the late November evening. Narcissa's housecoat provided little shielding from the cold or the rain. She cast on a warming charm and had the House Elves dig up six feet of red earth.

At the sight of the floating corpse, the little child clung to me, bawling, and I endeavored to soothe him with hushing and prattle. 

Narcissa's wand held steady as she sunk Abraxas into the ground. She cleared her throat and said, "Now I shall read the words he wished spoken over his bier." She had a Muggle book, old and faded. _The Canzoniere_ , by Petrach. 

There was no bier. There was no coffin. There was no hearse. The House Elves watched with large and luminous eyes. 

> "Yet I find there is no path so wild or harsh  
>  that Love will not always come there  
>  speaking with me, and I with him."

\--------------

The boy was restless against my breast. 

"He must be hungry," I said awkwardly. Babies turned hungry frequently, I had heard. 

"Were anything to befall me," Narcissa said softly. "Professor, would you grant me the honor of being his godmother?" 

A godmother. Sirius was Harry's godfather, and he was in Azkaban. I looked at the boy in my arms, trusting and hungry, palms curled into little fists pressed against my chest. 

"Lucius would not approve," I said, horrified. 

"Papa would have," she said simply, with conviction. Her facade crumbled, and she was a wee girl thrust into the role of matriarch. "Please."

I clutched the boy to me, keening in the wake of death to hold life. A woman's womb cried in me, admonishing me for what I had not allowed. There had been nobody, I tried reasoning with that craven desire. It was too late to yearn now.

Albus had his Castle. I had him.

Narcissa brought over the paperwork, with the Malfoy crest stamped upon it. I swallowed when I saw the cosignatory. 

Riddle and I had once been called the brightest of our generation. He had not married or sired. I had not married or given birth. His chicken scratch was sharp and bold beside my signature. 

"Draco Lucius Malfoy," I read the boy's name on the parchment. 

"Draco," Narcissa corrected me.   
  
Draco. 

\--------

The boat to Azkaban was manned by Ministry employees who leered at me. Grizzly and weather-beaten, they were Falklands natives who had never stepped foot at Hogwarts.  
  
"One of 'em Death Eater scum's wives?" They enquired, prurient. 

I did not grace them with a reply. 

My wools were of little avail in the sleet that poured upon the sorry earth from skies riven by the anguish of year's end. 

Alastor waited for me on the shore. 

"Minerva." 

"Alastor." 

He offered me his hand. I accepted his assistance and stepped off the boat. 

"I have no desire to enquire why you wish to see that murderer."

I said nothing to that. 

"Well, Albus insisted," he said grimly, and led the way. His Patronus, a cat, lit the way up for us, and kept the gaolers at bay. 

My robes dragged through mud and grime, and there was blood wet upon the flagstones of the dimly lit passageways of the towers. There was screaming and raving from the cells, as Aurors enacted a vicious brand of human justice that the Dementors could not. 

If it had been Albus or Riddle accompanying me, they would have bustled about reminding me to stay close to them, chivalrous madmen that they were and had been. Alastor had never underestimated me. He trudged on, without a backwards glance.

Riddle had once read to me of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus had turned back, breaking his vow, and Eurydice had died, never to return. _His half-regained Eurydice_ , Riddle had said, and I had not known then that he meant to leave his magic as a shade to nourish another. 

Cold washed over me, as Dementors drew themselves to my grief. I forced my thoughts to that bonny boy I had held, who had clung to me in trust, giggling and trusting. 

A godmother. 

Severus was in a grimy cell, scant three and half foot by seven, and it reeked to high heaven. His brow was drawn in horror when he fair flung himself to the bars. 

"What are you doing here?" He exclaimed, voice hoarse from dehydration. "Does Albus know? It is not safe!"

His hand came, greedy, questing, through the bar, striving to touch. His fingers were mottled with bruises and the bones had been set poorly more than once. Frightened, I made to take his hand in mine, to offer paltry comfort. I understood then why Albus had asked me to stay away. Sighing, Severus let my hand cover his.

"Crucio!" Alastor barked. Severus's head banged against the bars and he fell against a wall in a slump, trembling in nervous excitation as the curse washed over synapse and organ. "Don't touch her, murderer!"

"Alastor!" I said, horrified by the nonchalance he portrayed. "He spied for us!"

"Absolutely not!" Severus exclaimed. "I am the Dark Lord's servant! Albus Dumbledore is a Muggle-loving fool!" 

His eyes were pleading. Albus believed that it was not over, that Riddle's followers were at large, and that a handful of them were extremists. Albus feared that Severus's life may be endangered from these deranged followers were he to denounce Riddle. If they knew the extent to which Severus had betrayed Riddle, his life would not be worth a farthing. 

Alastor huffed. 

"Happy new year," I told Severus, steadying myself for him. If he could recover from whatever the Aurors had done to him in the name of interrogation and still keep his facade, I could act too. 

His face was a study in hope. 

"Did you come all this way to wish me a bloody buggering new year?"

"I am a godmother now, and the proud owner of a gramophone." 

"The myriad aspects of Minerva," he said, bloodshot eyes crinkling in amusement. 

I winked at him, glad to offer him a modicum of distraction and cheer.

His trial was next week. Albus remained confident, but I could see the nervousness he hid behind his facade. Albus had not wanted to visit Severus in Azkaban. Severus and he might have agreed on the greater good, but Albus had not the stomach to behold the consequences. 

So it had fallen to me to let the lad know that he had not been abandoned. I had come alone. 

"It is time for you to return," Alastor decreed. 

He accompanied me to the boat. His hand came to my right wrist, the first warm thing I had known on Azkaban. I brought my left hand to uncurl his grip and let his fingers fall fallow. 

"Goodbye, Alastor."

\-----

Albus was waiting for me at the Entrance Hall. He had been in London for weeks, dealing with the fallout from Godric's Hollow, pleading with the Wizengamot to enact restorative justice instead of retributive justice. 

I had returned from Azkaban, and he was wearier than I was. I opened my arms to him, and he came, tearful and wretched.

"Bless you," he whispered, forlorn. The Castle's magic was discordant about him, hateful and vicious, and through its cracks, the warmth of him, cocoa on a winter's night by a well-kept hearth, I saw only glimpses of. 

The Castle had been grieving since Riddle's fall. It owed the Headmaster loyalty, but, in sentience, it was a mother, and mourned a son as only a mother might. Mourning had been made a sword, and Albus was battered by the Castle's wrathful sorrow. 

We repaired to my quarters. 

"I had acquired something for you, from London," he muttered, and summoned a delicately wrapped package from his office. 

He waited impatiently as I unwrapped the parcel, childlike in his enthusiasm awaiting my reaction. 

"Oh!"

"Ha!"

I laughed, despite myself, at his exuberance. A ribboned, double-edged sword pierced cloudy skies on the cover of the record. _Hold the line_ , by _Toto_. 

Beaming, he urged me to put the disc on the gramophone. 

"I have only watched him do it before," I admitted.

"Here, let me show you," Albus murmured. 

Riddle's gramophone, despite its age, moved its stylus over the record seamlessly, as it began playing the eponymous song of the album. 

_Hold the line, love isn't always on time._

I looked at Albus sharply, wondering what message he meant to couch in this gift. He was not looking at me. The loss stamped fierce on his features was carven of secrets older than me. 

"He is still alive," he said quietly. 

"Dance with me?" I asked him, wanting to be silly and merry, if only to lift his cares away. 

So we waltzed, to _Georgy Porgy_ and _Rockmaker_. 

In the cramped sitting room of my quarters, lined with books and bottles of scotch, we cut a foolish duo, dancing to songs on Riddle's Edison gramophone. 

I had stood with a babe in my arms and watched Narcissa Malfoy bury her father-in-law. I had stood in Azkaban's guts and promised Severus that he would return home to Hogwarts. I had stood under sleet and steel skies, and turned away from the only man that had known me in passion. 

"His magic built Nurmengard. He cannot die while the Castle keeps him alive." 

"Alastor's patronus is a cat," I said absently. Albus's smile, fond and knowing, hid a mystery I knew not. 

"One more?" He asked. I nodded. 

The fire in my hearth had died. Albus fiddled with the record once more, and it began playing its repressible carol of hope.

 _Hold the line_ , it exhorted us. _Love isn't always on time_. 

"Smile for me, Minerva," Albus entreated. 

I smiled for him, for this dear friend that remained to me. 

\----

Severus's trial ended in January. It had been protracted and bitterly fought. Albus fought Crouch and Alastor with vehemence he had not demonstrated even when battling Riddle. 

I waited at the gates, and they came to me, one bedraggled and emaciated, and the other exhausted by justice's cause. 

"Here?" Severus whispered, eyes wide in disbelief as he looked at the Castle. "I did not think-" he swallowed and clung to Albus as a dying man to his last breath. "I thought you would leave me at Spinner's end." 

"You belong here," Albus told him simply. He cleared his throat and looked away when the lad began weeping, in exhausted relief. 

"Methinks Fawkes is warbling for his food," he said, and promptly excused himself. 

Sighing at Albus's standoffishness when it came to comforting another unless he knew them quite well, I went to Severus, who stood there profusely weeping, eyes fixed on the castle as if afraid he was hallucinating. He leaned into me when I offered my arm. 

"I see you brought me no gifts," I said mildly. 

"Oh, I did," he said, laughing, before it turned into coughing up blood. 

"Pray elucidate."

"Might I bother you for a cleaning charm?" 

They had broken his wand, before him, and he had not flinched from his facade of portraying himself as the Dark Lord's faithful. 

"The Elves have drawn a hot bath for you," I replied, though I gave him what he wished. 

"It shall be in tomorrow's Prophet," Severus promised. 

I looked at him askance. He looked mighty pleased with himself. What had he done?

\-----

I hurried to breakfast the next morning. 

"You woke with the rooster," Albus remarked, from where he was puttering about with Filius as they took down the Christmas decorations. 

"Is anything amiss?" Aurora demanded, from where she was having a late supper that served as breakfast. She must have stayed up all night with her cosmos, as was her norm on cloudless midwinter nights when the skies were clear. 

The owls came in then, with the morning edition of the Prophet. Albus was by my side swiftly, summoning my paper to him. 

"You meddlesome oaf!" 

He winked at me, and unfurled the news. Flitwick, Aurora, and I, huddled about him. 

On the front-page, grim-faced and outraged, was Alastor. 

"STAR AUROR FORCED INTO RETIREMENT BY THE MINISTRY!"  
"GAY DISEASE STRIKES MAGICAL LAW ENFORCEMENT!"  
"VICE, VIOLENCE, AND VIRUS!"

Rita Skeeter had combined volatile emotional verbiage with faulty reporting. The Minister and the Head of Law Enforcement had issued statements saying that they did not condone the actions of any personnel who were afflicted by the Gay Disease and deliberately concealed it from the Ministry. 

Aurora's hand was about my waist, and she was dragging me to one of the House tables so that I might sit down. 

Filius watched me for a long moment, before patting my shoulder and taking his leave.

"The boy carries a torch for you," Albus murmured. 

"Please don't tell me you had a hand in this travesty!" Aurora was chiding him, boffing him on the nose with the coiled up paper. 

\----

The knocking must have woken up even the dead. The Bloody Baron was glaring at me. I glared right back. 

Then I cast an Alohamora and was surprised when the door opened. _Constant vigilance_ , Alastor would have demanded. 

Severus was slumped on the tatty sofa Slughorn had left behind. There was a half-empty bottle of scotch on the carpet. Huddled under Albus's monstrous peacock feather blanket, he was a wee, wan thing of shadows and bones. He stank of pain potions. His hands were in a cast, and placed on his chest with his head bent curled over them in protectiveness. Albus had broken and reset all his fingers again, this time properly. 

The Bloody Baron stared at me. I neatened the peacock blanket, and tucked it in about Severus's gangly limbs. Then I left the Baron to watch over his new Head of House.

\----

Fudge cleaned out the ranks, and passed strict laws to ensure anyone who tested positive with the Gay Epidemic would not hold a Ministry position. 

Many women were hauled over the coals, by Rita and a pack of rabid journalists, despite their claims that they had been unaware that they had the virus. 

In the library, I perched on the bay window that looked over the Lake, and read the Scarlet Letter. How many times had I watched Riddle ensconced upon this seat reading his books of adventure in far-off lands, in his tattered woolen blanket, being plied biscuits and tea by the House Elves that fawned over him? I should have suspected then. The Castle had sensed its heir, even if nobody else had. 

The doors of the library opened. I glanced across. Irma was on vacation with her sister in Jersey. Albus and Aurora knew better than to interrupt me while I was reading. 

It was Severus.

"I had not expected the collateral damage," he confessed. "I only meant to teach him a lesson."

What did he know? Had Albus been wrong? Were my suspicions from the beginning been proven right? 

I waited him out. 

"You have nothing to fear," he said, stumbling over his words in his haste to explain. "Minerva, I suspect now. I did not know anything when I spoke to Rita, I swear! I swear!" 

"What did you know?" I asked quietly, willing myself strong. 

He licked his lips, feverous, and continued to speak. 

"The Aurors were interrogating me. Veritaserum. Moody asked me if I knew potions to cure HIV. I-" he swallowed. "I knew of a potion, but it was the darkest and the most potent of magic. I had brewed it only once, with Voldemort's blood. I did not think I could reproduce it, not without his guidance." He shrugged and began pacing, agitated. "Moody was displeased. I realized then that he sought it for himself. I was furious, you understand. I was-" he glared at me, tearful and pale-faced. "I could not bear it, Minerva! I knew that he was your lover! He had endangered your health!" 

He was breathing fast, and his pulse leapt in his throat. "I cannot bring myself to regret this."

"I cannot hope to brew it," he continued harshly. "I spent my days in Azkaban trying to fathom how I might beg Albus to help me brew it to save you." 

The grief he wore was naked, and it was his grief for me. Overwhelmed, I rose from my seat and went to him. His eyes flickered over me, hopeful and anxious, and his breath stuttered. 

"The potion was for you."

"The potion was for me," I affirmed. 

"Thank God!" he whispered, and folded as a rag wrung dry, falling into a seat on the nearest chaise, head collapsing buried into his hands. His father had been a Christian, Albus had said. 

I could not bring myself to loathe him for ferreting out my secret. In Azkaban, strung apart by torture, he had still yearned to avenge me, ill-conceived as his notions had been. The collateral damage he had caused many innocents with his foolish act of revenge was immense and grievous. 

"Who knows?" He demanded. 

Why did he enquire? If none knew, would that preserve his esteem of me? My hand clenched tight about the spine of _A Scarlet Letter_. 

"Albus," I replied. "Alastor. Filius and Aurora suspect, I am sure. Whoever Riddle told."

"He was not one to gossip," Severus muttered. "He might have been stark raving mad, but he was not given to chatter, particularly when it came to what he held dear." 

"Virtue is carven into every man, even in those who show not its grace," I said wryly. 

"He had many virtues," Severus replied, and sounded bloody sincere too. How could he acknowledge this without rancor, after a year of the Cruciatus, after Godric's Hollow? "The dichotomies of him were fascinating. Muggle psychologists would have had a field day."

"Have Albus replace Horace's sofa," I told him. 

He shrugged. Beholding my sternness, hastily he nodded acquiescence. Then, as I made to leave, he caught my wrist, reminding me uncomfortably of Alastor at Azkaban's landing when I had made ready to depart. 

"I was castrated," he said quickly. "Standard procedure, for the prisoners. All of the men were," he rattled on, brisk-mannered, but betraying everything on his expressive features despite his resolve to be brave. 

I slumped down beside him, wearied beyond measure by what justice had come to mean in our country. Alastor had been bright-eyed and warm, kind and charming to all, and my heart had been his. Then he had joined the Aurors, and had turned obsessed with retribution. Crouch, Scrimgeour, Bones. How many of them had turned to the same means that the enemies had favored? 

My womb had woken in desolation the first time I had held Draco in my arms. Narcissa's eyes had been full of pity, and a serene sadness. She had known. Her husband would not be able to give her more children, though he had been returned to her from Azkaban, by virtue of Malfoy name and money. 

"Severus."

"I wanted to tell you. I am struggling to grapple with it," he said softly, meeting my gaze despite his anguish. "Albus and I knew this would come to pass, in all likelihood. My mental preparedness, I am afraid to admit, has served me not a whit."

I hugged the brave creature, and he came easily into my hold, seeking to be comforted. Women of my age had grandchildren. I had Albus and Aurora, Filius and Severus, and a Castle that grieved for its child. I had a godson. 

"Read to me?" Severus demanded. 

"Do you enjoy being read to?" I asked curiously. 

"Nobody has, before," he admitted. "Please read to me." 

> “Does he love us?” said Pearl, looking up, with acute intelligence, into her mother’s face. “Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three together, into the town?”
> 
> “Not now, dear child,” answered Hester. “But in days to come he will walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our own; and you shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach you many things, and love you dearly. You will love him; will you not?” 
> 
> “And will he always keep his hand over his heart?” inquired Pearl.

Severus's hands were stiff, as they healed, but he brought his right over his heart. His gaze remained unwavering on mine, and in it was sparkling a soft-spun tenderness that did not dare to speak. 

The men that befriended me had no sense nor shame. 

* * *

_1990s_

"Miss Granger reminds me of you," Aurora confessed, as we lay upon her tiger furs under the summer skies. 

The girl was often to be found in the library, reading and learning. She was awkward in company. She had been more fortunate than I had been, and had made a friend. 

The boy, Harry, made of scar and hero's myth, had come back to us after every summer, with skin on his bones and hunger in his bright eyes. Albus and I bitterly argued, again and again, about this child's welfare. 

" _I can raise the boy_ ," I had begged Albus, in vain. 

Lucius and I had come to bury our hatchet for Draco's sake. The boy, despite his childish rivalry with Harry, and despite being too eager to impress his pompous father, had Narcissa's sense. He was a lonely child, as was Harry. 

I had been a lonely child keening to be loved and seen. Riddle had cured his loneliness desperately and bound himself to a dying man with carved-up soul and a tether of magic freely handed over. Albus had given himself to a castle. Filius had once called the Hogwarts staff an assortment of eccentrics that the world outside had discarded, who only each other knew to love. 

"Severus and I were in London last week," Aurora went on. "He spent hours scouring the record stores to fetch you Muggle music."

I hummed. He gifted me Muggle books and music often. How was I to tell him that _Clash_ , _Ministry_ , and _Judas Priest_ were not to my taste? Of late, I had been listening to _Love Potion No._ _9_ , on summer nights that smelled of hawthorn. Narcissa's hawthorns had never bloomed again, in her western gardens, after Abraxas's death. 

"That boy carries a torch for you," Aurora went on. 

Severus had never pressed his attentions further, and had left his wishes unspoken. I dithered often, wondering if it was my age that had led him to silence, wondering if it had been a passing whim of his.

I had begun dreaming of him. I had once dreamed of fantasy lovers from romantic drivel I had read as a young woman. I had never dreamed of Alastor. I woke often, flushed and furious, wet between the thighs, and trembling in want, with Severus's face in my mind's eye. 

Sixty. _Sixty_ years of age. How could I countenance this infatuation? 

"That one," I told Aurora, pointing my finger at a star that stood away from the rest. "Tell me her tale." 

"Fomalhaut is Alpha Piscis Austrinus, the brightest star in the constellation of the Southern Fish. The name Fomalhaut derives from the Arabic Fum al Hut, meaning Mouth of the Fish," Aurora narrated. She caught my hand in hers and lifted up a dangling chain of stars to where was the constellation of Aquarius. "The Water Carrier and the fish." 

"Fomalhaut was one of the four guardians of the heavens to the ancient Persians, and given the name of Hastorang. The other guardians were Aldebaran in Taurus, Antares in Scorpius, and Regulus in Leo." 

Aurora placed her head on my shoulder and said quietly, "It is fascinating that you picked Fomalhaut."

"Why?"

"Astronomers call Fomalhaut the Lonely One."

It shone bright, strung alone on that southerly patch of night's black.

\----

"Are the two of you squabbling again?" Severus demanded, barging into my quarters as if he belonged there. I scowled. My guardian portrait had taken a fancy to him. 

"What do you want?"

"Albus is moping." 

I scoffed. 

"He sighs as gustily as a Victorian maid, Minerva! I cannot bear it!" 

Severus grew exasperated swiftly whenever Albus and I were on the outs. He had become used to harmony and loathed anything that interfered with his normality. 

"What did he do now?" he demanded. 

"He caved in to the Ministry demands to host a tournament!"

"Is that all?" Severus asked, perplexed. "The students find ways to nearly die in a _classroom_. Surely making a spectator sport of it isn't the worst idea Albus has had." 

"Severus!"

"Ex Death Eater!" He excused himself, grinning mischievously. Oh, how could I bring myself to cold reserve, when he was in high spirits and striving to cheer me up? 

"You made a terrible Death Eater."

"Recruitment consisted of beer and marijuana," he explained. "They got exactly the cadre they looked for." 

Laughing at his nonsense, I bade him sit. He lit up at the invite and scurried to my liquor cabinet to fetch my best Scotch. 

"What is the occasion, pray tell?"

"I am with you."

He said it with such bloody earnestness that I nearly refrained from throwing one of Albus's errant, mislaid pouffes at him. As he made to catch it mid-air, with wickedly fast reflexes that made my stomach clench, his sleeves slipped, and I saw the faint Dark mark. 

Was it darker than it had been last I had noticed it? Harry's scar, at times, was inflamed red, and the boy complained of headaches that none of us could pinpoint the source of. 

"Severus, has the mark changed?" 

"Oh, not you too!" He muttered. "If you must cook up conspiracy theories, there is a man with a pet phoenix I can introduce you to."

"Severus." 

He sighed and came to sit at my feet, resting his head without a care on my calves. Shaking my head at his plucky bravado, I dared bring a hand to his hair and neatened it as best as I could. 

"Evan Rosier and I researched the Mark extensively," he said finally, after long moments of quiet. He tossed back the scotch in his tumbler, and poured himself more. Drinking me out of house and hearth, this one. 

"What did you find?" 

"It was a last failsafe," he said bleakly. "Should Abraxas need magic, and if he was starving due to Voldemort's magic running out, Voldemort built this enchantment to draw from us in turn, channeling our magic through his to sustain Abraxas." 

Druids of ancient Celts had channeled magic of tributes to appease the Gods they worshipped. Means which may serve the end that they held dear, they had not shied from. 

Riddle had layered failsafes with failsafes, and Abraxas had chosen to follow him in death. 

"I hated him," Severus said quietly. "I hated him for his callousness. I wished, dearly, that one day, another might act to save me as he had acted to save Abraxas." 

He shook his head and poured himself more scotch. 

"Read to me, please." 

> “Let us not look back,” answered Hester Prynne. “The past is gone! Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol, I undo it all, and make it as it had never been!”
> 
> So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the stream. With a hand’s breadth farther flight it would have fallen into the water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about. But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost jewel, which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and unaccountable misfortune.

Severus sighed, as Hester must have as she watched her scarlet letter flutter away, shed of stigma and fear. He turned to me with a face full of want. 

"Minerva." 

I nodded, unable to summon words. 

He laughed, disbelieving, and turned about to kneel up to kiss my cheek. 

As Hester, we looked to the future. 

\----

Harry came back with Cedric's body in his arms, pale and resolute, and told us that the Dark Lord had risen once more, wrought of his blood in a cauldron. 

I rushed to Albus. Despite our estrangement when it came to Harry's welfare, his sternness dissolved into careworn tenderness as he held me. 

"What must we do?"

"His madness remains," Albus replied wearily. "I speculate that his followers enacted one of those dark rituals in ancient lores that serve to resurrect none. It worked, this time, because of his magic remaining tethered to this plane."

Wormtail was not a powerful wizard. Barty Crouch, while cunning, did not have the intelligence required to craft and fine-tune an intricate potion of this nature. The attempt had worked, despite their limitations, because of Riddle's magic that keened desperate to be whole, for what was soul but magic, and what was magic but soul? 

The power had not been in the ritual. It had been in emotion, in the yearning of a soul to return to itself. 

"I mean to destroy the stores of his magic," Albus said briskly. 

"You mean to destroy his soul."

"Will you have another war?" 

Albus, over the years, had turned brittle. The Castle's animosity had embittered him. I did not dare imagine how it must be to bear a sentience that mourned another and blamed him for the loss. 

Severus returned then, alarmed and pale-faced. 

"He did not take the tidings of Abraxas's death well." 

All that Riddle had planned and sacrificed and stolen, and Abraxas had gone gladly to join him in death without taking any of it. And then Riddle had wandered, as a shade, tattered in soul and magic, in a realm neither of the dead nor of the living, driven _madder_ , as Orpheus's Eurydice half-regained. A slipshod ritual had returned him to form, and he had woken a widower. 

"He is convinced that the boy is to blame." 

"Why?" 

Severus waved his hands, gesticulating angrily. "I doubt he knows, Minerva. I doubt he can hold a train of thought long enough to connect fact to emotion." 

"The others?" 

"Lucius persuaded him to liberate the Lestranges and the other prisoners from Azkaban. It should serve to occupy him awhile." Severus shrugged. "Perhaps Bella's return may settle him. He was fond of her." 

Danger turned Severus resolute and calm, and his natural state of agitation and grumpiness faded away to purpose. My heart surged with tenderness for this brave man. It must have been evident, because Albus coughed gently, and Severus grinned bright at me. 

Perhaps Aurora was right. After Alastor, I could not bring myself to overtures indicating interest. So I had shielded myself as best as I could, playing off Severus's interest as a passing fancy. 

It had not passed in twelve years. 

Twelve was a good number, I had once thought. 

"I had best retire," I told Albus. His eyes were blazing with knowing, but for once he kept mum. 

"Good night, Minerva," Severus said.

I held out my hand to him. 

A lifetime ago, I had offered my hand to Alastor, and a roomful of Aurors had watched me with pity. Severus was not Alastor. And Albus was my friend. 

"Minerva!" Severus breathed, eyes wide in shock. 

"Aye or nay?" 

He shook his head and bobbed it in rapid succession, and laughed and scowled too, and then giving up on words and sense, came to me in haste. His lips were warm promises upon mine, truthful in the paeans of desire they pressed unto me, and when my hands wrapped about him, he pressed his brow to mine with the sigh of a shipwreck glimpsing shore.

This was the first kiss, then, in a roomful of portraits, and behind us, Albus was fiddling with his glass instruments, chatting away merrily to Fawkes.

"Don't mind us!" Albus insisted. "Fawkes and I have been curious about the mysterious operation of heterosexual passion." 

That was our cue to leave.

We tumbled into my quarters, to the bed where I had never brought another, and he took it all in with eyes desiring. 

"I hoped," he confessed, when he caught me watching him. "In my dreams, you were Boudica, fierce and bare, bidding me to your whims."

Alastor had pressed me against wall and bed, and had pleasured me. I had never learned to pleasure him. 

"I have no sophistication to offer you," I warned. 

"If I wanted sophistication, I would be paying a whore in Paris," Severus declared. Then, seeing how his careless words had struck me, he hastened to add, "There exist whores in Paris. I have never met one. Albus is right, you know. I have been carrying a torch for you since I was fifteen. I cannot tell you how many times I rubbed one out in your classroom." The faint splotches of color on his cheeks became him well. His youth had been stolen from him by the war. 

"Let us begin there, shall we?" I asked, effaced by his confession. 

"Where?" He asked, flushing. 

"Show me what you would do in my classroom." 

A bashful, desirous offering he turned into, melting under my voice and gaze, stripped bare upon my bed. I had to curl my fists to prevent touching him, as he skimmed his fingers over his neck and collar bones, and then trailed down his chest to his belly. 

"Will you have me today?" he asked sweetly, without even a veneer of pride masking his wishes. That someone wanted me in trust was a heady sensation that sent me reeling. For the first time, I understood why Riddle had acted as he had. Trust was an addictive drug. 

"What would you like, Severus?"

"Will you ride me?" 

I had never been astride Alastor. Severus was patient, as he helped me clamber atop him. Clothed, straddling his nudeness, I found myself in possession of mischief and curiosity, bending to kiss him again and again, as a bee suckling greedy upon a blossom, paying no mind to his plight as he shifted in need beneath me. 

"Mercy," he demanded, laughing, flushed, and on his lips was writ red an eternity's surrender to me. 

\-----

I woke in the morning to find Severus sprawled across my thighs. Restless sleeper that he was, he had shifted and tossed and turned, until he had made for himself a cosy pillow upon my belly and thighs, cheek pressed warm to my pelvis. 

My bed was in utter disarray. 

I thumbed his kiss-reddened lips, and wondered if I could have this everyday. When would he tire of me? I held no pretensions about my ability to keep up with him, when it came to physical intimacy. My hand dragged a line across a bed crease left on his shoulder. 

"Love you," he muttered easily, half-asleep, and snuffled, and returned to sleep.

\----

"It is inadvisable," I told Albus. "The age difference decrees a foregone conclusion. So I shall be very careful." 

He hummed, heaping up a pile of bacon onto his plate. 

"Your arteries are made of wonder," Filius whinged, stabbing a tomato in displeasure.

"The Castle likes bacon," Albus declared. 

\----

Severus caught up with me at the foot of the grand staircase, as I was about to retire that night. 

"Yes?" 

"Oh, come now!" he insisted, frazzled by my reserve. "Don't start this again, Minerva!"

He had whispered to me of love, half-asleep, and I had been terrified of how his words had flayed open my heart's secret, that I cherished him as I had cherished nobody else, that I feared it might end as most engagements of this nature ended, as the younger man tired of the crone he had been once fascinated by.

He must have run after me. There was sweat beaded on his brow. The crinkles at the creases of his eyes were marked by the concerned frown he wore. 

"Give me a few days," I bargained. 

"Whyever not?" He said wryly. "Haven't I waited for you for years?" 

Then he sighed, frowned once more, and told me plainly, "Don't go looking to borrow trouble from the maybes of tomorrows, Minerva."

\----

Trouble came looking for me.

I was returning from Hogsmeade with Aurora, when we were attacked. A stunner caught me, brutally precise, and I knew well whose magic it was. Bellatrix Lestrange had no nuance in her casting, but she had ever been terrifyingly effective. 

\----

I woke up in a little chapel and heard the sound of river rush. Upon my skin, warm ran the familiar magic that had enervated me. 

"Aurora," I demanded, rising hastily from the chaise I had been dumped onto. 

"Stunned and left at Rosmerta's," Bellatrix replied. 

Azkaban had left her emaciated and aged. Her bone structure was all that remained of her beauty of once. There were scars on her décolletage exposed by the corseted gown she wore. What had they done to her? The men, Severus had said, were castrated. What did they do to women? Pity seized me. 

"Where are we?" 

She did not deem it necessary to answer. 

I could not cast wandless magic, not as Albus could. There was only one option left. In the summer of 1986, I had learned to become an Animagus. I took a deep breath, and transformed smoothly into my Animagus form. Bellatrix swore and brought aloft her wand, but she was too late, and I had leapt nimbly to scratch her hands, and then her chest and belly. Before she could curse me, I made to bite her wrist to force her to drop her wand. 

A red arc of light blazed through my peripheral vision then, and I fell onto the floor, thrashing, and scratched the flagstones in a vain bid to scramble away. The spell ceased, though my joints and eyeballs ached past endurance's limits. 

I tried to transform, and screeched as my body and magic failed me. 

"I can deal with a cat," Bellatrix insisted.

I tried to transform, and yowled when I could not. 

"Out!" 

Blinded by pain, I barreled to the voice, and leapt into his arms. Riddle's heart beat as a hummingbird's, and I pressed my nose to the desolate heat of it. His fingers trembled as he righted his hold.

"What possessed you?" He was shouting at Bellatrix. "Death will be kind as compared to what Dumbledore shall wreak upon you!"

"I am not afraid of Dumbledore," she said dismissively. "Narcissa told me to fetch her."

"Have you entirely taken leave of your senses?"

"It is not my sanity that is questionable!" 

Riddle's wand rose, before he hastily dropped his arm as if burnt. Bellatrix grinned smugly. 

"Leave." 

"I am not leaving you with her! Narcissa will have my head for it." 

"She is safe with me." 

"She is Draco's godmother."

Riddle's body tautened in surprise, but he said nothing. 

"Are you certain?" Bellatrix asked again, and the bleak, grim note of her tone testified to how she grieved, then and in Azkaban's cold heart and now, for his unravelling. 

"I am quite myself," Riddle said. "Leave." 

Bellatrix scowled and nodded to him, before departing. 

"The Cruciatus interferes with magic that adapts the musculature," Riddle explained to me quietly. "Wait for two hours before you attempt the transformation again."

Severus was quite adept at Apparating himself without splinching even if he had been thrashing under the Cruciatus mere moments before. He must have a high tolerance for it. I understood then why Albus paced, worried to distraction, waiting for him. Brave, brave lad. He was unwavering in his convictions. Why would I fear his heart's turn? When had that stubborn prat ever changed his mind on a matter?

"I possessed many small mammals in the eastern forests," Riddle said softly. "My mind has not unlearned the easy osmosis it had once mastered for survival."

He was falling into my thoughts. I glared at him, and scratched his sleeves for good measure. 

Cats are extraordinarily attuned to emotion. I knew the warm curls of his joy as he beheld me, and his curiosity at what he sensed in my thoughts. 

"We are in Galashiels," he told me. "Gala."

We were in the Borders. The river I heard must be then be Tweed. 

He bundled me into his arms clumsily, saying, "I have never held a living cat, I must admit. There was a grizzled, old man who lived in Blackheath. Muggle. He had served in the Raj. His wife had been killed by a tiger in Bengal. So he hated all cats, and mounted them on his walls in various morbid enactments. He would pay street rats in buns and tuppence, to bring him dead cats to taxidermy." 

I scratched him again, this time on a cheek. He deserved it for his bloody cheek. Albus knew well to stay out of my reach when I was in this form. 

"Desist, desist," he said, and his amusement was a wash of warmth against my magic. 

We were outside, and he walked with me upon a muddy path that led to the riverbank. 

"The Black Path," he narrated to me. "Gala was where the Black name was born, did you know? Legend has it that a band of Scots caught a trespassing English soldiers stealing from their plum trees. The Scots slaughtered them all. Hence the motto of Gala, as two foxes reaching up for sour plums." 

What did that have to do with the Blacks?

"And then mercenaries were dispatched by the furious commander of the slaughtered regiment. They were led by a cruel man."

"He had been born in Persia, to an Englishman and his Persian mistress. He abandoned her when she caught a child. She died under the stars of her people, and named her child after one of them, after the brightest star in the southern skies. Fomalhaut was his name. He lived a hardscrabble life, stealing and cheating and killing, until he came to English shores, seeking his father. He did not find the man. He did earn himself a dark reputation, as a mercenary that English barons sought to despatch upon their enemies." 

"Fomalhaut led his mercenaries and slaughtered the villagers of Gala, sparing only women and girls. Blood washed black from Langlee to the banks of the Tweed. The Black Path, they called it afterwards, and he came to be known as Fomalhaut Black." 

Riddle carried me to the banks of the river, and across us, we could see Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford manse. He sat beneath under a giant ash, leaning against the bole of it, and crossed his feet at the ankles. Quietly, we watched the river go by. 

"I have been faring poorly," he confessed, to the rain, to the river, to the cat perched on his lap. 

Albus had once watched the sea at Oban in wistful greed, and in his forlorn smile had been a heart that remembered its loss by Danube's waters, when he had sealed a man alive in a tomb of stone. 

> "She undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the stream. With a hand’s breadth farther flight it would have fallen into the water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about." 

Riddle watched the river as Hester once might have, wishing the waters to wash away his heart and with it himself too, to carry onward him to its depths woe and all, as another skein added to the tales it had seen by its banks before. 

I nipped at his fingers playfully. His smile was wan, but he traced one of my whiskers with curiosity, setting aside the sorrow-drunk alien heart of him. 

"Minerva McGonagall, the finest of our generation," he said, greeting me as once he had taken his leave of me. 

The Norse, Aurora had once told me, believed that the _axis mundi_ of our world was a vast, evergreen ash tree that they called Yggdrasil, and that it was watered by three magical springs. However, modern Wizarding historians, she said, had come to the consensus that the Yggdrasil was a yew tree. 

Riddle sat beneath a giant ash, by the Black Path, and the Tweed wound its way through the heart of Gala. He had survived as a spirit, as mere magic, for thirteen years, until a foolish ritual had restored him to form and madness once more. There were bruises on his wrists, from where he had clutched his fingers in desperation to hold himself grounded. Every thud of his heart was mourning's evergreen. _Ash, hawthorn, holly_ , Abraxas had said with his last breath. 

  
Mustering my magic, I pushed through the muscular tremors and the lack of coordination that the Cruciatus had left behind, and transformed from cat to woman. Riddle's hands came swift to bolster me as I reeled in pain. 

"Two hours," he chided me. 

"I know a song of Gala," I said blithely. "I am a Scotswoman, you know." 

"A scotswoman, a cat, a Minerva," he agreed, amused, and his magic washed healing through my synapses and nerves, leaving me renewed. I raised my eyebrows in surprise. He had not his wand. And that had not been a spell.

"Picking up a new trade?" I asked. 

"In the eastern forests of the Akroceraunian, upon those thunder-split peaks, where once Caesar had led his armies to pursue Pompey, I wandered as a spirit. Under the eaves of those ancient woods, under ash trees older than you or I, my magic was sublime and unusual," Riddle said, distracted. "His wand was of ash. Perhaps the bond-" he pressed his lips together, and fell silent. 

The relationship between the Castle and its Headmaster was not parasitic, Albus had insisted. _Commensal_ , he had declared. Abraxas had eaten of Riddle's magic, and given him in turn this consolation under an evergreen wood by the riverside. 

"May I have a scotswoman's song of old Gala?" 

I had never sung before another. Aurora tried to coax me into singing, when the pale pink of dawn smeared across her skies, when we were both drunk and giddy. I had not fallen into her trap yet. 

> Braw, braw lads of Gala Water!  
>  O braw lads of Gala Water!  
>  I’ll kilt my coats aboon my knee,  
>  And follow my love through the water. 

Riddle's voice was a far cry from its mellowness in our youth. He joined me, though we had no gramophone, though we had no instrument. 

> Sae fair her hair, sae brent her brow,  
>  Sae bonnie blue her een, my dearie;  
>  Sae white her teeth, sae sweet her mou’,  
>  The mair I kiss she’s aye my dearie.

So we sang, he and I, in turn after turn, and then together, by the river, of a lad and his dearie. In the sunset's weak gold through the downpour, a rainbow rose over the waters. Under an ash tree, I stood with Riddle, and his magic settled from the volatility of grief to bleak acceptance. The rainbow shimmered on the river's face, and Riddle turned to me, and the pain he wore was transcendently human in its wholeness. 

How long and how keenly had I researched the matter of his soul? _Remorse_ , Albus had postulated would be the only recourse to join the disparate parts once more. I had given up hope then. How could Riddle be remorseful for what he had chosen willingly? He may regret his choices for the consequences that came about, but he had never regretted his heart's course and what he had undertaken to save Abraxas again and again. Riddle was not Albus. He had not Albus's selfless strength to seal his heart in a tomb of stone for the greater good. 

Bellatrix had captured me and brought me to Gala, where the first of her ancestors had come by the Black name. Riddle had not taken her to task for her impulsiveness. Despite how she had baited him, he had not acted. His Cruciatus had been panicked and desperate when I had been scratching her ribs in a bid to escape. 

I knew then what had repaired his soul.

Overcome by joy, I embraced Riddle. His magic, whole once more, did not strike upon me scattered, cold splinters. The castle's joy rivalled mine, as it peeked bright blue through the verdant evergreen of him. 

He wept in my arms, and I held him to me, until the long-carven grief in him mellowed soft to remembrance and made room for another love. 

"A girl," he whispered finally. "It was-" he laughed wildly, dismayed and overjoyed. "Rodolphus was castrated in Azkaban, but Bella and he wished to have a child. So they decided to inseminate her with a potion made of another man's seed. I did not expect-" he broke off, voice a choking sob. 

He had not expected an attachment. _Love Potion No. 9_ had once blared in that grimy pawnshop, and I had run there after Alastor had rejected me. I had wished for a love potion, without a speck of seriousness. Riddle had rained down scorn upon my wit. He had attacked a mute animal, with the Cruciatus, frightened of the harm it might cause the child he had come to love despite the potion's creation it was. 

> Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world. 

Hester had found that to be true. 

Severus had taught me this lesson.

Narcissa had taken pity on me once, and had given me her child to hold. She had been proud and strong, though the Ministry had ransacked her home, though she had to bury her father-in-law in the rain in a grave dug hastily by House Elves, though the rest of her family was in Azkaban or dead or estranged from her. 

Another Black sister had taken pity on Riddle. She had found a way to hoodwink him to sanity and wholeness once more, anchoring his unravelled heart to a new love. 

"What is her name to be?" 

"Delphini." 

"After the Oracle of Greece."

"Narcissa claims that a haruspex foresaw this," he said softly. "The constellation of Delphinus is dear to Bella and Rodolphus. They had walked together under Job's coffin, under that bright coffin-shaped four-pointed asterism of Delphinus, on the last night before their capture and imprisonment."

He made to speak again, but shook his head, chagrined. 

"What is it?" 

"I suppose you shan't think me madder." 

I shook my head at the self-deprecating half-solemn remark. Once, he had been obscenely confident in himself. Then he had sent his research to Albus, to save me, afraid to trust his wandering mind. Whole, he was wise, and sad, and the evergreen of him was drenched in knowing of horrors old and new, caused and endured and reaped. 

"Narcissa's flowers bloomed for the first time since Abraxas's death. I dreamed of hawthorn that healed. And the morning after, Bella came to know that the potion had taken, that she was with child."

He shook his head, and asked quietly, "Did you know that Severus's wand is of hawthorn?" 

Yes. His first wand, of acacia, had been broken by the Aurors when they had taken him into custody in the Great Purges that had followed Riddle's fall at Godric's Hollow. 

Albus had taken him to Ollivander, and they had returned with Severus bearing proudly a wand of hawthorn. Hawthorn was a healer's wand, and it favored women. Severus had healed me, once my flesh, and then my heart. 

"Hold the line," I told Riddle.  
  
He looked at me askance. 

" _Hold the line, love isn't always on time_ ," I sung to him that old song Albus and I had once played on his gramophone and waltzed to. 

"Well, it has arrived at your doorstep, plucky and persistent," he remarked. 

"And drank all my scotch." 

"He shall match the heart in you," Riddle said quietly, offering me his arm, leading us back to the Black path. "Endeavor not to borrow trouble from tomorrow." 

"You sound as Albus." 

"It must be the Castle in us."

I laughed at his nonsense. 

Turning our backs on the river and the sunset, we walked together to the little chapel in Gala. 

\------

At Gala, Lucius waited with Albus by the old, ruined chapel where Bellatrix had brought me to. 

"The negotiations are complete," Lucius said smartly. "All parties have signed the Christmas Tuesday Accord." 

"Here a wall shall be raised of magic," Albus said. "To the north, in Glasgow, we shall establish the Northern Ministry. To the south, in London, Griselda shall establish the Southern Ministry." 

As Germany, we had divided our country into two. By the Tweed, by the ancient Anglo-Scottish borders, the wizards raised a wall of magic on Christmas Eve. 

"The war is over. Professor McGonagall, the Headmaster has come to fetch you."

Severus was safe. Harry was safe. Draco was safe. Riddle and Albus were safe. 

"Goodbye, Riddle," I told him. 

Albus looked away to examine the rising moon. Lucius stepped away, leaving us alone. Taking the gesture for what it meant, I grinned and rose to my toes to kiss Riddle's cheek. 

"I have a book for you," Riddle said, and summoned it to us. 

A paperback, cherished and old and well-read. _Georgics_ , by Virgil. 

"Ah!" Albus exclaimed, his meddlesomeness unable to resist comment. " _Hence beasts, flocks, cattle, and the sons of Earth, All draw the vital soul at birth._ I have forgotten the next verse, I am afraid."

He had not. Albus had an eidetic memory.

" _Dissolv'd at length again all Beings roll back to their source: but not mortal is their soul_ ," Riddle spoke. 

Under the starry skies, by the river Tweed, on the Black path, the Castle's soul gleamed bright and happy in blue, drawn from a source immortal and of unnumbered years, and Albus and Riddle wore their truce in a quiet and naked song of magic wisened by grief. 

\-------

"You ended a war for me," I told Albus, when we walked together to the Castle where we belonged, he and I. 

"What have I left, if you were taken from me?" he asked solemnly, wearied and alone, clinging to friendship and to a Castle's bond. 

"He would not have harmed me."

"His mind had fled him long ago." Albus looked at me with a wan smile. "No war, no cause, no moral shall outweigh my wish to see you restored safe to our home."

I embraced him, this man who had loved me and saved me, and I knew I was his saving grace too.

Warmed and blue, the Castle's magic greeted us in delight's exuberance. 

"Bless you, Minerva," he said softly, and took my hand as we crossed the threshold of the castle. 

\------

"A new, old book?" Severus exclaimed, when I went to his quarters in the dungeons bearing _Georgics_. "Poetry? Minerva! Poetry in a dead language?" He glanced at the title. "Poetry from a dead man! May I recommend _Black Sabbath_ instead?" 

"You have drunk all of my scotch and tormented me with that dystopian clatter you call music. Now it is my turn to drink yours and inflict upon you dead poets."

"Why do you suppose that came about? I have no scotch in my quarters!" He muttered, letting me in, chivvying me to his tattered sofa. 

"You have not replaced Horace's furniture!" 

"It had not ranked high on my priorities." 

"Whyever would that be?"

"I had it all worked out! I meant to move into your quarters atop Gryffindor Tower nearly twenty years ago."

I kissed the silly, patient, enduring creature he was, and poured my long-held shameful secrets from my mouth to his.

"I had an epiphany on the nature of viruses." 

"Pray tell." 

"They spread by touch, by proximity, by intimacy. How clever of them, to know that we in our imperfections and desperate loneliness, crave to seek and hold and be held, as is the course of human things."

As is the course of human things.

"Admiring the intelligence of viruses?" I asked lightly, wishing not to taint our joys with what was once. 

He laughed, free and utterly careless in his happy abandon, and tugged me to his bedroom. 

"Is that Horace's bed?" 

"The sheets are new!" He insisted, and tumbled me upon the white expanse of the bed, and gladly came to me bright-eyed and true. 

"You reek of Albus's magic and Voldemort's," he complained. "I swear, it is as if neither can stop marking up territory on the Castle and on you!"

"They ended a war for my sake," I reminded him. "You had best worship me, Severus." 

He laughed and kissed me sweetly once more. His cheeks were flushed and he switched our places, with him beneath me. 

"Shall I ride you again?" I teased him. 

"Take me," he asked, blushing splotchy, bringing our joined hands between his spread thighs, to where his body opened in need. When I skimmed a finger there, his cock leapt full against my belly, leaving an obscene stain of pleasure. 

His shamelessness and keen enthusiasm to offer himself reminded me of the young woman I had been in my twenties, wanting all, wanting to give all. He was not in his twenties, but he had clung to his dreams and desires in ways I had not known to. 

I transfigured one of Horace's nightstands into a contraption I had seen only in erotic Witch Weekly novels. Clumsy-handed, wanting, Severus sat up to help me affix the harness to my hips. His lips came to my breasts, in lewd worship, suckling there as a child. I pushed him supine, and watched him carefully as I entered him. 

"More, more, more," he demanded. 

"Greedy, wanton thing! The next time you steal my scotch, I know what penance I shall seek from you." 

"Incentives, Minerva," he said, laughing, stuttering for breath as I slid home. His head fell back, and I bit down the length of his yielded neck, to his collar, to his breast, and he took it all willingly. 

He taught me to move, to fuck him until he cried my name in ecstasy, until he was warbled words and clutching hands upon my hips that demanded and entreated and loved.   
  
Afterwards, he vanished the harness and tugged me to his mouth. 

"Severus, you silly creature!" I exclaimed, horrified by how he sat me upon his face and stuck his tongue without ado into my cunt. 

He hummed a merry tune. _Hold the line_ , I recognized. Oh, this beastly wondrous creature who held me. He opened me without shame, slurping and suckling, dragging me recklessly from crest to fall, again and again, until my legs were limp and the room reeked of me. 

He settled me beside him, and neatened my hair with extraordinary politeness, guileful thing that he was. His face gleamed wet, and when I kissed him, I tasted the wild passion he had drawn from me as a bee drawing nectar from honeysuckle. 

"I shall keep you," I decided. 

"You are in my bed. Who is the keeper and who the kept?" 

"Horace's bed," I corrected him. 

The shameless man grinned and stuck his fingers once again into me, frigging me into gasping surrender once more. 

\----

When I woke, Severus was watching me as once Riddle had watched Abraxas, as once Albus had looked east to far-off lands across the Danube where his heart was captive in stone, as once a young woman had looked at Alastor Moody. Lonely beasts that keened to be loved, then and now, and grace had come to us in latter days. 

"Shall I read to you?" I asked this dear thing, this marvelous heart of me. 

He smiled and settled his head on my breasts, quiescent and absolute in his surrender. I ran a hand through his hair and picked up my book of Virgil. 

> "Thus every creature, and of every kind,  
>  The secret joys of sweet coition find.  
>  Not only man's imperial race, but they  
>  That wing the liquid air, or swim the sea,  
>  Or haunt the desert, rush into the flame:  
>  For love is lord of all, and is in all the same."  
>    
> 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> [ **Leitmotifs, Themes, and Songs of Pandemic** ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29586945)


End file.
